Lee Vandervis

I initially supported STV as promoted by Otago University Political Studies Professor Janine Hayward, as being more representative than the traditional First Past the Post system still used by the majority of NZ Councils.

My first decade of actually seeing the effects of STV and my personal investigations into STV including many questioning emails to Warwick Lampe of Electionsnz have completely changed my view.

I learned that the STV system we use in NZ was borrowed from a winner-only system and modified by two computer programmers at the NZ Department of Internal affairs to rank losing candidates as well as picking a winner.

The concept of taking people’s second preference votes into account was achieved by first taking the lowest polling candidates second preferences and bouncing them up to the next lowest polling candidate etc in a series of computer iterations and through arbitrary thresholds that ended up making subsequent to first preference votes very important in the final outcome.

I have repeatedly challenged Electionsnz to prove that this system is truly representative, after I found that this modified STV system boosts minority candidates and punishes candidates with strong views and supporters who tend not to cast second preferences.

Electionsnz have only confirmed that the they test the program before every election and that it gives consistent results, not confirming that it supplies truly representative results.

Major practical drawbacks of this modified STV system include:

1 – most people find having to rank large numbers of candidates daunting, rather than simply ticking the candidates they want under the traditional FPP system.

2 – Modified STV promotes minority candidates – this effect being approved by people like ex-Mayor Hawkins who has falsely claimed ‘that majority rule can never serve minorities’.

3 – Modified STV punishes candidates with strong views or policies, in favour of waffling or fence-sitting candidates.

4 – The computer programmers who modified the STV system setting thresholds and other parameters have moved on decades ago and nobody now can interrogate these parameters.

5 – When faced with a modified STV computer program that has significant complications and has many people arguing for and against, faith in our electoral system declines along with voter participation.

6 – There are few opportunities for scrutiny of this STV voting system, with voters expected to simply accept an end result from screeds of iterative number charts with subsequent preference votes bouncing all over them.

If we are to restore faith in our Electoral system, I suggest that Dunedin goes back to First Past the Post voting, that the $55,000 election advertising limit be extended to six months prior to the election to make it meaningful, and that Mayoral candidates not be allowed to aggregate many times the $55,000 advertising limit spending across many ‘team’ Council candidate supporters.

If not, we face a future where only multi-millionaires, or candidates funded by multimillionaires with ‘teams’ will have the best chance of becoming Mayor in Dunedin.

The reality is that money buys votes which is why we have the $55,000 limit.

The Electoral Commission should also remove DCC Council staff from all election-related roles, as DCC bureaucrats, especially CEOs have conflicts of interest because resulting Mayor and Councillors will be their direct employers.

This was strikingly seen in the run up to the 2019 Mayoral Election where DCC staff ran a smear campaign against me as the leading Mayoral contender where I still got the majority of First Preference votes, but lost to second preferences.

DCC staff publicly ruling on electoral signage and other electoral advertising issues again should only be done by independent Commission staff or contractors.

The Electoral Commission should run our elections with completely independent staff operating all the electoral roles currently run by DCC staff.

And lastly, the Electoral Commission should stop sending thousands of voting papers to students in Dunedin North for many years after they have moved on, as many of these papers are easily misused.

I have complained to the Commission for years about these voting papers floating around Dunedin North, having seen them piled up in University halls of residence common-room corners and other places.

To summarise, I suggest that we return to the traditional electoral system where people vote ticking just who they want in booths across Dunedin with scrutineers available in a simple First Past the Post system.