Six years ago, I wrote about NZ's voting system, MMP. Specifically, I talked about how it ensured the government accurately reflected the population, unlike the winner-take-all approach used by most other countries.
This week, it went to custard.
A quick recap: In New Zealand, Parliament has 120 seats and 71 districts. You vote for your local candidate *and* your preferred party. The candidate who gets the most votes in each district goes into Parliament and then they allocate the remaining 49 seats based on the overall party vote.
Of course, most people vote for the same candidate and party, but this means that if your local candidate doesn't win, your party still gets represented. For example, Party A gets 30% of the nationwide party vote, which means it is entitled to 36 seats (30% of 120), but only wins in 25 districts. Therefore, it gets to appoint nine more representatives (which come from a list that is published before the election).
To put this in US terms, in the 2012 elections, Democratic candidates for the House of Representatives received 48% of the votes nationwide while Republican candidates received 47%, but Democrats got 201 seats while Republicans got 234! If the US used MMP, then Democrats would have gotten 209 seats and Republicans would have gotten 205 seats.
So that's the advantage of MMP, but it does have one flaw: What if Party A gets 25% of the party vote but their candidates win in 35 districts?
You have three options:
1) Tell Party A to get rid of five elected represenatives. This isn't democratic.
2) Expand the number of seats from 120 to 140 so that 35 candidates now represent 25% of the seats. This would be a nightmare.
3) Carve up the 49 seats as before, then add five more seats. This is called "overhang," and this year it got weaponised.
That's because another feature of MMP is that it encourages people to vote for third parties. In the US, that would be considered a wasted vote because that candidate has no chance of winning, but in New Zealand it means that party will be represented (provided they get at least 5% of the vote). As a result, the major parties rarely win 50% outright. In the last 11 elections, Labour has won between 25 and 41% while National has won between 21 and 47%. (The only exception is 2020, where Labour won 50.01%.) So every election they have to put together a coalition with one or more minor parties in order to get above 50% required to form a government.
Last election, National formed a coalition with two minor parties (NZ First and ACT) and they made a real hash of it, so it didn't look like they would get a majority of seats this year. However, people on the right started telling people to split their vote: Vote for the local National candidate but give your party vote to one of the coalition partners. As a result, National got 42 seats when it should only have 35, while its coalition partners gained 6 seats from their 2023 results. As a result, they now have 67 seats when in reality they should only have 60.
Now here's the kicker: Normally, you only need 61 seats to control the 120-seat Parliament. However, the Maori party decided to use the same tactic, encouraging its members to vote for their candidates but give their party vote to Labour. As a result, they went from having 3.1% at the last election to just 0.6%! That doesn't even entitle them to 1 seat, but because five of their candidates won their districts, they created their own overhang, increasing the size of Parliament to 131. As a result, you need 66 seats to form a government.
As I mentioned, the current coalition has 67 seats, but there are still about 400,000 votes to count. (These are the so-called "special votes" are from people overseas or who voted in a different electorate than where they live, which is very common in New Zealand.) For some reason, it takes 3 weeks to process these, but historically they've swung left, and there are currently four districts where Labour could overtake National (by 139, 456, 1092 and 1210 votes, respectively). If National lose two of these districts, they have 65 seats but they also lose the overhang, so Parliament goes to 129 seats and they can (just barely) form a government. If National lose three of these districts, they can't.
But even if Labour win all four of these districts, and Parliament goes to 127, that only gives the left bloc (Labour, Greens and the Maori party) 61 seats, three seats short of a majority!
Enter The Opportunity Party. Formed in 2016 by Gareth Morgan, it got 2.4% of the party vote in 2017. A month later, Gareth Morgan resigned and six months later he announced he was cancelling the party's registration. However, new leaders were elected and they got 1.5% of the party vote in 2020 and 2.2% in 2023. Having never exceeded the 5% threshold, they never had any seats in government. A new leader was elected in 2025 and she had some crazy ideas, including a universal basic income that would cost about $24 billion/year, which was funded by a land tax that was supposed to raise $24 billion/year. They did not factor in the idea that people might not want to own land if it was taxed so highly.
However, the new leader was smart enough to bury that lede and come up with six talking points that she said was her "bottom line" to support any government. These were:
1. Bring down supermarket prices
2. Cap political donations
3. A 10-year health plan
4. Ban bottom trawling
5. Recommitting to emissions obligations under the Paris Agreement
6. Honour the Treaty of Waitangi, the founding document of New Zealand, which the Coalition government had spent three years trashing.
5. Recommitting to emissions obligations under the Paris Agreement
6. Honour the Treaty of Waitangi, the founding document of New Zealand, which the Coalition government had spent three years trashing.
These all sound good but there's no real plan behind any of them (and #2 is particularly ridiculous considering Gareth Morgan invested $4 million to form the party in the first place). However, that was good enough for 6% of voters, giving TOP 7 seats. If Labour flip three seats (which is a big if), they will still have to negotiate a four-way agreement with the Greens, the Maori party and the Opportunity Party to form the next government!
The Special Votes will be posted November 27 and then the negotiations will begin. We may not know who actually won the November election until January!*
Addendum: Ignore the above. I just read the "split your vote" campaign didn't really affect National; they just naturally lost a ton of party votes (roughly 250,000) since the 2023 election. On the left, although the Maori Party told its members to vote for Labour, the Maori Party lost 50,000 votes but Labour only picked up 5,000! Interestingly, the Green Party picked up 50,000 votes...
* There used to be more Special Votes because new voters could register on election day. The National Party decided to end that - and require voters to register at least two weeks before the election - in a brazen attempt at voter disenfranchisement, because of course most new voters were young and therefore tended to vote left. However, National framed it as "speeding up" the vote counting process, so it's ironic that the first election after they changed the rules is going to take even longer than before to figure out the results!
(Labour wants to drop the voting age to 16, and although that's also a brazenly partisan move, I'm more keen on expanding voting rights than shrinking them.)
