The electoral-system
Jul 14th 2007, 5:10 pm
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The electoral-system
This question is mainly for native New Zealanders or those who have at least 15 years of adult age experience of NZ. Namely, as I´m very interested in politics a thing like the electoral system is quite important. NZ changed its electoral system in the mid 90´s following a referendum on the issue.
Do you like your present electoral system or would you like to move back to the old First-Past-The-Post single member constituencies electoral system? I understand that one thing which prompted the change of the electoral system was that two or three times there was an election-result when the party with the largest number of votes across the country still lost in terms of seats against the other large party. Indeed, under the old system there were really only two parliamentary parties, the National and Labour. Today there are many more.
Whenever there is a change in the electoral system the first election under the new system is bound to be buggered as too many people do not understand the system and therefore indeliberately invalid their ballots or unconsciusly vote exactly the opposite who they meant to vote.
As the electoral-reform debate is going on in the UK, the NZ version has often been presented as an alternative to the current system still in place which in the last election gave Labour 55% of the seats with 35% of the votes.
Do you like your present electoral system or would you like to move back to the old First-Past-The-Post single member constituencies electoral system? I understand that one thing which prompted the change of the electoral system was that two or three times there was an election-result when the party with the largest number of votes across the country still lost in terms of seats against the other large party. Indeed, under the old system there were really only two parliamentary parties, the National and Labour. Today there are many more.
Whenever there is a change in the electoral system the first election under the new system is bound to be buggered as too many people do not understand the system and therefore indeliberately invalid their ballots or unconsciusly vote exactly the opposite who they meant to vote.
As the electoral-reform debate is going on in the UK, the NZ version has often been presented as an alternative to the current system still in place which in the last election gave Labour 55% of the seats with 35% of the votes.
