All electoral systems can be gamed to a greater or lesser extent. First Past the Post invites gerrymandering, for example, where electorate boundaries are drawn to concentrate the supporters of one party in a single district, to minimise the number of seats that party’s candidates win. The manipulation of MMP is more complicated, but we’ve seen degrees of gaming from the very start.
An obvious early example is Jeanette Fitzsimons in the Coromandel electorate back in 1999. Because the Greens were right on the edge of the 5% threshold, it was uncertain coming into the final stretch whether they would make the cut. And so Helen Clark let it be known that she would not object to Labour voters giving their electorate vote to Fitzsimons instead of Margaret Hawkeswood.
Fitzsimons narrowly won the seat, beating National’s Murray McLean by just 250 votes on the final count. And if there is any doubt as to the impact of Clark’s endorsement, consider that she received 13,682 electorate votes against just 2640 recorded for her party. In the end, it did not really matter, because the Greens crossed the 5% threshold when special votes were counted. Still, it was a useful insurance policy and an early example of overt tactical voting.
Then we have Epsom, which is the point at which tactical voting was considered to no longer be fair because it wasn’t benefiting the left any more.
People forget that in 2005, Rodney Hide genuinely wrested the electorate from Richard Worth. It was not gifted to him, and National did not want to help Act survive. But Epsom voters were canny enough to work out the choice before them and Hide prevailed.
Over subsequent elections, National made its peace with the arrangement and became less and less coy about it with every cycle. By 2011, John Key was doing the “cup of tea” thing with John Banks. By the next cycle it was really just an overt endorsement, even if National continued running Paul Goldsmith as a candidate.
People complained, but there was nothing particularly constitutionally outrageous about it.
What Te Pāti Māori wants to do now, however, is a serious escalation. At its own campaign launch, the party has asked supporters not to give it their party vote. It is campaigning for electorate votes only. The obvious potential effect is to create an overhang that could give it disproportionate influence in the next Parliament.
As a refresher, the party vote is meant to be the primary manner in which a party’s seat entitlement is calculated. However, if a party wins more electorates than its share of the party vote allows, it keeps the extra electorate seats and Parliament simply becomes larger and less proportionate. For example, if a party would be entitled to six seats through the party vote and wins seven electorates, it gets seven seats and Parliament increases from 120 members to 121.
This happens all the time, but they’re meant to be in the nature of a safety valve to deal with the occasional awkward result thrown up by voters. They were not envisaged as a deliberate mechanism to skew election results in ways that defeat the purpose of proportional representation. Previous manoeuvres could affect who governed, but it’s worth noting that neither the Greens nor Act has ever had the benefit of overhang seats.
And neither case involved a political party saying, in effect: please do not give us the vote that determines our proportional entitlement because we may get more MPs if you give that vote to our friends instead. So, as I said earlier, this is a real stepping up of the electoral system being gamed. And if TPM can pull it off, it will enjoy a temporary advantage at the cost of poisoning the well for everyone, including itself.
We’ve seen the scenario taken to its logical conclusion in another country. It did not end well.
The African nation of Lesotho held its first MMP election in 2002. Its Parliament of 120 members was elected in 80 single-member constituencies, and they were joined by 40 list MPs who were there to ensure proportionality. By all accounts, the first election went off without a hitch.
In 2007, however, the Lesotho Congress for Democracy made a deal with the National Independent Party. The LCD would pursue election via constituencies only, and the NIP would pursue the party vote. In response, the opposition parties concluded a similar arrangement of their own.
So it came to pass that the LCD won 61 constituency seats while its buddies in the NIP won 52% of the party vote, entitling it to 21 of the list seats. And so an alliance between them that won a shade over half the votes managed to bag itself almost 70% of the seats in Parliament.
If you think that civil peace followed, then think again. The situation became violent enough that intervention from the Southern African Development Community was required. And while Lesotho has never been a model of a peaceable political system, the gaming of the election contributed significantly to the destabilisation.
The dispute was only resolved when Lesotho changed its electoral law to remove the two-vote system. From 2012 on, voters received a single vote, which was counted for both the candidate in that constituency and the nationwide party vote. And that’s one place we might end up if TPM successfully games the 2026 election.
However, for my money, I think it is more likely that the result would be the abolition of the reserved Māori electorates. I support retention of the seats, on the grounds that they are a part of our tradition and, like the House of Lords in Britain, should not be abandoned lightly. But that only holds so long as any distortionary effect remains mild and non-decisive when it comes to the question of who governs.
The reality is that arguments about the Māori electorates are a mainstay of political debate in New Zealand, and it doesn’t take much to provoke heated debate about their continued existence. Both Act and NZ First want them gone, and it’s only the downsides of engaging with the issue that allow National to keep its own party base away from the issue.
But if the quirks of MMP are purposely used to provide extra MPs to support a Labour-led Government that would otherwise have fallen short, all bets would be off. And it wouldn’t just be National voters who would see a problem. Millions of voters could easily be persuaded that a feature of the electoral system intended to guarantee Māori representation was now being used as a weapon to circumvent the democratic will of the people.
Te Pāti Māori has often prospered from the canny use of tactical voting in the past. Now, it may just bring down the very feature of the electoral system on which it has relied. Overreach has that effect sometimes.
In the final analysis, this is just one of the reasons I have never favoured MMP. The old system was capable of being corrupted, and we see the problems with First Past the Post in the United States all the time. But New Zealand solved the gerrymandering problem decades ago with the Representation Commission, which has worked well to insulate boundary drawing from temporary partisan advantage.
The more complicated a system is, the harder it is to stop that system from being gamed. You either have to keep tinkering with the system in response to each new abuse or accept some tolerance for distortion.
We’ve mostly opted for the latter approach in New Zealand. You could even make the case we’ve been too tolerant at times. But even New Zealanders have limits.
This article was first published HERE and is reprinted with permission.