Steve Baron: Voting system not the best one

IN JULY 2014, the Wanganui District Council - in its wisdom - decided against using the Single Transferable Vote electoral system instead of First-Past-the-Post for the October 2016 council elections.

I think this was a big mistake because First-Past-the-Post means many votes get wasted - and neither does the system truly reflect the wishes of voters.

I suspect this decision was made because of a lack of understanding on how the Single Transferable Vote system works and it was probably much easier to stick to the same old system. This happened for more than 100 years in national elections before MMP was introduced in 1996.

With the Single Transferable Vote system, each voter has a single vote that is transferable. Voters number their candidate preferences - 1 for their favourite candidate, then 2, 3, etc - rather than just ticking boxes for as many vacancies as the election is seeking to fill.

Candidates who reach the quota (using a specific quota formula) from first preference votes are elected. In addition to that, if Tom Jones was by far the most popular candidate, receiving 7000 votes but only needing 5000 to be elected, the extra 2000 votes he received would then be transferred to voters' second preference.

This saves any wasted votes and it also means that the most preferred candidates (generally speaking) get elected.

Likewise, the least popular candidate with the lowest vote is eliminated and those votes that would have been wasted on this candidate are then transferred to a voter's next preference without being wasted.

There is a bit more to it than this, but I will not bore you with any further intricacies.

Even though the Single Transferable Vote is a fairer system it is, unfortunately, complicated - though that should not stop us from using it. For example, very few of us know how an internal combustion engine works, but we are all still happy to drive a car.

The Single Transferable Vote system is not that foreign to us either. It is used to elect all district health boards throughout New Zealand as well as for seven other city and district councils. Using the same system for both elections would likely save a lot of confusion and reduce spoiled ballots. It is also used in Ireland, the Australian and South African senates, several Australian states and Malta.

As it is for local body elections, First-Past-the-Post is still used in national elections to elect our electorate Members of Parliament. This often means an MP wins the electorate seat with far less than a majority vote. For example, if the votes are tallied up as 30 per cent, 25 per cent, 25 per cent, and 20 per cent to four candidates, this means that the electorate MP with just 30 per cent of the vote wins - a situation that hardly seems fair.

The Napier election result is a good example of this with a close three-way split that saw Stuart Nash win the seat with far less than 50 per cent of the vote - and yet he was possibly the least favoured candidate of the three.

Using a preferential system like the Single Transferable Vote to decide electorate MPs would also be far more representative of voters' wishes. While there is no perfect electoral system, I encourage all Wanganui councillors who are elected in October 2016 to give serious thought to updating our system. The role of the mayor and councillors is a governance role and they need to choose the fairest system of electing representatives for our city.

-Steve Baron is a Wanganui-based political commentator, author and Founder of Better Democracy NZ. He holds degrees in economics and political science