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July 27, 2005
Is STV unnecessarily expensive?
New Zealand's National Party Leader Don Brash thinks so.
"Labour's new local government, dog control, treaty, climate change, STV voting system, and resource management laws have added hundreds of millions of dollars to New Zealand's rates bill," Dr Brash said.
To combat this,
National has promised to reduce local government red tape, axe Maori seats on councils and have all local body elections conducted under the first past the post voting system.
In his full speech, Dr Brash (which, even if he is a bit misguided, is a cool name) concentrated on the incumbent Labour party's woeful bureaucracy. Not sure how changing the voting system would combat inefficient government departments, but to be fair, Dr Brash didn't make a direct link either. His only direct complaint against STV was as follows:
National will also be making changes to the Local Electoral Act. The debacle over the use of STV made a mockery of New Zealand democracy. We had Afghanistan holding a poll on the same day for the first time in their history able to deliver results weeks before ours, despite having more than 20 million votes to count and little more than donkey trails for communications. This is a clear case where the KISS principal – Keep it Simple Stupid – needs to be applied.
For the record, Aghanistan's voting system doesn't sound that simple, and it does sound a bit shoddy, but I don't know enough to judge it properly. It is, however, irrelevant. You'd think something as important as electing who gets to run the country for the next few years was worth a little bit of a wait. Obviously, even counting the votes under the basest systems tends to go wrong, be it chads or postal vote fraud, or just a general inability to count among the people charged to do it at a silly hour in the morning.
If the worst charge against a voting system is that it takes a few more hours to work out who's won, that is, in my mind, a positive. Voting systems are notoriously flawed, so if the biggest charge is that politicians driven mad with power and impatience can't sleep until they know the result: meh.
It appears Dr Brash would rather like to Keep It Simple And Stupid.
Posted by pauldavies on July 27, 2005
Comments
STV delivers results that more accurately reflect voters views than FPTP. STV takes a little longer to count than FPTP. Which is more important?
The National Party in NZ have been smarting ever since, despite having massive funding from big business, they lost the referendum to keep FPTP for general elections in 1993.
Knowing they haven't a hope in hell of persuading voters to return to FPTP in general elections they are concentrating on attacking local elections that have recently changed to STV. I think STV is more of an easy target than the AMS system they have for electing their government because it is more complicated and expensive.
We have to accept that some people cannot cope with having to put 1,2,3, instead of x on a ballot paper, let alone the fact you need a maths doctorate to be able to understand the counting process of STV.
This is why I'm in favour of simple PR systems like AMS because they are so easy to understand. This is an important factor. Also remember that STV is strictly not PR, but another weird British invention used in a few places with British connections, e.g. Ireland, Australia, NZ.
Posted by: Neil Harding at July 28, 2005 12:08 AM
I assume the maths doctorate remark was a jocund aside, given that a) you're not asking the common people to vote AND count them up afterwards and b) it's really not that complicated.
Were the Electoral Reform Society more cannibalistic than they are, they would probably gobble you up for criticising STV :)
The main disadvantage as I see it with STV is not that it's at all complicated, but that it often allows you to rank candidates too far, thus still allowing petit tactical voting and encouraging some people to just put down numbers randomly next to the people they don't know anything about. I can't see how it's fundamentally that much more EXPENSIVE, other than paying people for longer to count them up. How much do those people get paid these days?
The main argument against AMS systems is the problem of some MPs (or representatives) being assigned to a constituency and some not, which is instinctively harder to overcome than the STV problem (where you can just limit ranking)
Anyway, there are ways round most of these problems. I intend to post the conclusion bit of the final election report from ERS up on the site today, which has a bit more on the AMS vs STV debate.
UPDATE: I did intend, but the columns/PDF thing isn't making it esp easy, maybe another time...
Posted by: Paul Davies at July 28, 2005 10:25 AM
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