Richard Prebble
Columnist, former cabinet minister and ACT Party leader.
Under First Past the Post, National would have won a landslide victory on Saturday’s electorate results.
National won 42 of the 71 electorates. All the other parties combined won just 29.
National would have had a majority of 13 seats over all the other parties combined and could have governed alone.
Across all 71 electorates, National candidates received 992,314 votes. Labour candidates received 812,660.
National won nearly 180,000 more electorate votes than Labour and twice as many electorates.
Yet under MMP, it is still possible that Chris Hipkins will become prime minister.
How did we go from an electoral system that gave us a government on election night to one where we must wait three weeks for the politicians to begin negotiating what we voted for?
This article was originally published by I’ve Been Thinking.
