Ani O’Brien
Like good faith disagreements and principled people. Dislike disingenuousness and Foucault. Care especially about women’s rights, justice, and democracy.
After 30 years of Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) representation, we may finally have reached the point where everyone works out how to properly game the system at the same time. For most of the MMP era, political parties have called for “two ticks” with a few notable exceptions like the Epsom electorate. The idea has been to not encourage voters to think too hard about the fact that they have been given two separate votes because parties would very much like both of them.
This makes perfect sense from the perspective of support for individual political parties. However, when the system consolidates into blocs as it has done in recent years, it does not necessarily continue to make sense from the perspective of a voter who has less loyalty to a party and more interest in one bloc gaining or retaining power. With less than three months until the New Zealand general election, people on both sides of politics seem to have independently arrived at roughly the same conclusion… it is time to get creative with MMP.
Over the weekend, Te Pāti Māori made vote splitting its official election strategy. It is campaigning for candidate votes in the Māori electorates while effectively ‘releasing’ its supporters to give their party votes to Labour, the Greens, or another party on the left. Debbie Ngarewa-Packer described it at the party’s campaign launch as “one plan, two votes”. Rawiri Waititi has gone further, arguing that a Te Pāti Māori electorate vote can elect one of its candidates while a Labour or Green party vote can help elect another Māori MP from those parties’ lists. In Te Tai Tokerau, for example, he told voters they could elect Te Pāti Māori’s Aperahama Edwards while Labour’s Willow-Jean Prime and Green MP Hūhana Lyndon returned through their respective lists.
A very similar strategy is being proposed on the other side of politics too. Former National and ACT leader Don Brash proposed essentially the same trick in an interview last week and it has set tongues wagging. Brash suggested on the Platform that voters who want the current coalition returned should give their electorate vote to National candidates across the country (with the exception of Epsom and Tāmaki), while directing their party votes to ACT or New Zealand First. The intention is that National continues winning a great pile of electorates while its party vote collapses below the number of seats those electorates would normally entitle it to. Then ACT and New Zealand First receive the party votes that National has deliberately forgone. Hello, overhang.
Before getting into the competing strategies, lets quickly run through how an overhang works because this entire scheme depends on a peculiarity of MMP which most people vaguely know exists without necessarily understanding what it can do when deliberately exploited. Skip ahead if you are an MMP aficionado.
The party vote normally determines how many MPs a party is entitled to take into parliament. For example, if a party receives roughly 30 per cent of the party vote, it should receive roughly 30 per cent of the seats. Those seats are filled first with the electorates the party has won and the remainder are filled from the party’s list. So if National is entitled to 40 MPs according to its party vote, and wins 35 electorates, it will get five list MPs to fill its 40 seats. However, if it wins 40 electorates, the party fills its seats with electorate MPs and gets no list MPs.
The key to overhang strategies is what happens if a party wins more electorates than its party vote says it should have. It has to keep them as the electorate has voted for a specific candidate and that creates an overhang. The Electoral Commission gives the example of a party receiving enough party votes for around six MPs but winning seven electorates. All seven electorate MPs remain in parliament, the party gets no list MPs, and parliament expands to accommodate the additional seat. The other parties do not have seats taken away to compensate, we just have more MPs in total.
Many people don’t realise we currently have an overhang in parliament. Right now, parliament has 123 MPs rather than the 120 it is ‘meant’ to. This was created by Te Pāti Māori winning more electorate seats than its party vote could accommodate. So while the phenomenon is not new, what we have not seen is a major political bloc attempt to turn this feature of MMP into a mass strategic-voting operation.
National’s position on this was clear even before Brash floated his proposal. At the party’s annual conference in June, campaign chair Simeon Brown told National supporters that “sharing isn’t caring, sharing is diluting” and explicitly warned them not to give their party votes to ACT or New Zealand First. Chris Bishop has since responded to Brash by saying voters would punish that sort of game-playing. Of course they would say that. They aren’t stupid. Asking the National Party whether National supporters should give their party votes to ACT and New Zealand First is like asking Woolworths whether customers should buy their groceries at Pak’nSave. National exists to elect National MPs. It is not a charitable foundation established to maximise the combined parliamentary representation of the centre-right.
Voters, however, are under no obligation to care about National’s institutional interests. Voters should act in their own individual and collective interests and the best hope for any political party in an election year is that those interests align with voting for their party. And Don Brash has made a compelling case that the centre-right voters would benefit enormously for approaching this election as a bloc rather than as supporters of each of the three parties.
The Brash Strategy, as I am going to call it because every daring electoral manoeuvre sounds better when named after somebody, is much more ambitious. It is about attempting to create additional seats in order to shift the weight of parliament in favour of the right.
Imagine, for the sake of easy numbers, that National wins 43 electorates but receives a party vote which would normally entitle it to only 25 seats. National does not lose 18 electorate MPs in order to restore proportionality because obviously we cannot tell 18 people who won their local elections to go home. So National would get all 43 electorate MPs and zero list MPs, creating an overhang of a whopping 18 seats.
Meanwhile the party votes which centre-right voters gave to New Zealand First or ACT instead of National have not vanished. Those votes result in more list MPs for those parties meaning the number of centre-right MPs expands.
Some people are calling it a clever way to “make both votes count”, but this understates the objective. Both votes already count. The objective is to use a quirk of the system to make them count in different ways. One voter. Two ticks. But potentially much more parliamentary representation for the voter’s preferred bloc than would result from just going “two ticks” National.
You can see why people are excited about it as strategy. You can also see why the Electoral Commission recommended removing overhang provisions during its 2012 review of MMP. The commission was already concerned about the proportionality implications of overhangs long before anyone contemplated attempting one on this scale.
Te Pāti Māori has arrived at the same destination from the opposite direction. Its strategy is actually easier to understand because the party has a highly concentrated electorate base. It does not need to win 40-odd electorates. There are seven Māori electorates and Te Pāti Māori believes it can win enough of them to make its parliamentary presence largely independent of its party vote as it did this term of parliament. So it is sacrificing the latter.
Waititi describes this as an “ultimate sacrifice”. There is a fair bit of theatrical flourish in that description, obviously. On current polling they are not anywhere near the five per cent party vote threshold required for entry to parliament without an electorate seat. Te Pāti Māori is not throwing itself into a volcano to please the electoral gods. It is just attempting to maximise the number of MPs on its side of parliament.
Party votes are political capital in our system and parties beg for them because they determine not only parliamentary representation but also the public perception of a party’s size and legitimacy. It is always easier to ‘sacrifice’ what you don’t actually have, but Te Pāti Māori is effectively telling voters not to worry about making their party vote bigger. That is why their strategy feels like less of a play for dominance and more of an attempt at survival. They have had a shocking term with the party only hanging on by the skin of its teeth amid fissures and bootings. Te Pāti Māori seems to be conceding that their supporters might not be thrilled enough with their performance to be willing to cough up both ticks so they are creating a narrative of “greater good” to concede the party vote without losing the electorate one.
Survival or not, if Te Pāti Māori is successful in this strategy they will see benefits similar to that proposed via The Brash Strategy. The party will retain or expand its electorate representation and if (as is likely) its electorate victories exceed the number of seats justified by its own reduced party vote, an overhang will be created.
There are, however, several fairly enormous “ifs” in there. The largest being that Te Pāti Māori actually has to win the electorates. This would be a much safer strategy if the party were entering the election in fabulous organisational health with six (Labour currently holds one Māori seat) unbeatable incumbents. But it is not. It is really not. Its spectacular internal implosion last year has left scars across several electorates. Mariameno Kapa-Kingi and Tākuta Ferris fell out with the leadership and are no longer in the party, electorate committees resigned, former party figures publicly criticised John Tamihere and the leadership, and Te Tai Tokerau and Te Tai Tonga are now considerably messier contests than they otherwise would have been.
Their electorate-only strategy therefore contains a gamble. They are displaying an almost comical degree of confidence for a bet that could result in utter electoral decimation. If you deliberately crater your party vote and then fail to win the electorates, there is no clever MMP trick left. You have simply lost.
There is another sizeable issue with their plan. Their allies in Labour and the Greens are not reciprocating. Willie Jackson has been positively delighted to accept any Te Pāti Māori party votes coming Labour’s way while making it abundantly clear that Labour will continue campaigning for its own electorate candidates. Marama Davidson has said much the same for the Greens. Apparently political altruism has limits.
This means Te Pāti Māori is attempting to persuade its supporters to behave as a bloc while Labour and Green voters remain free to vote Labour and Green in the Māori electorates. Asymmetry throws the whole game plan out of the window because Te Pāti Māori is now effectively only talking to its shrinking base rather than bringing in new Labour and Greens voters who are also thinking strategically. The plan is much shakier when only one party is doing the sacrificing.
Willie Jackson also issued another warning to his allies in Te Pāti Māori that deliberately manufacturing an overhang through the Māori electorates could create a backlash against the Māori seats themselves. He may well be right. There are certainly plenty of grumblings that the time for Māori seats has passed given how successfully Māori MPs get elected without their assistance.
However, Jackson is being a little bit cute about it too. It is likely he is just scaremongering to put voters off giving Te Pāti Māori their electorate vote instead of Labour. Labour would love to pocket all seven Māori seats and his objective is to dissuade anything that risks that.
Even at its most successful, however, Te Pāti Māori can produce only a handful of overhang seats. The Brash Strategy is far more explosive. If the right bloc pull it off, National, theoretically, could manufacture dozens of overhang seats.
National won 43 electorates in 2023 and while its current polling is substantially below its 2023 party vote, many of those electorate MPs remain well placed to hold their seats. They are struggling on a national level, but haven’t seemed to take the hit locally.
I have seen some modelling on various election outcomes and one particularly interesting model takes National down to 19.8 per cent of the party vote while assuming it retains all 43 electorates. Under that scenario, National keeps all 43 MPs despite having an absolutely dire party vote. Assuming ACT rises to 12.8 per cent and New Zealand First to 15.6 per cent, the parliament balloons to 141 seats. The right ends up with 78 seats, with 71 required to govern.
Disclaimer alert! That is just a scenario, obviously, not a prediction. Polling changes at the drop of a hat and there are no guarantees that electorates won’t change hands. Voters do not move around in tidy mathematical blocks and National supporters cannot be programmed through an app like little blue Roombas and sent off to execute the optimal electoral strategy. And ACT and New Zealand First voters are definitely not interchangeable.
But the modelling demonstrates a possibility and that possibility would be an extraordinary outcome.
Brash’s proposition is basically that the centre-right should stop thinking about National, ACT, and New Zealand First as competitors for the purposes of the ballot and instead treat them as different instruments for producing the same governing majority. National’s structural advantage is its electorate machine while ACT and New Zealand First’s role would be converting party votes into additional MPs. National supplies the constituencies and ACT and New Zealand First supply the lists.
So why, when they could benefit from a massive overhang, does National hate the idea? There are actually perfectly respectable reasons for National to hate it despite its potential. A government consisting of 43 National electorate MPs and enormous ACT and New Zealand First caucuses would be a very different government from the one National currently leads. David Seymour and Winston Peters would not respond to their bolstered caucuses by modestly asking Christopher Luxon what he would like them to do. To put it bluntly, coalition negotiations would be carnage.
National voters who like the current government but find ACT too economically radical or New Zealand First too, well, Winstonian, may reasonably prefer a larger National caucus even if some theoretical alternative produces more seats for the right overall. They may prefer to take the risk that the three parties can scrape a majority in the hope that the smaller majority has more National seats than ACT or New Zealand First.
MMP makes the smallest of size differences matter. Everything is proportional (its in the name!) and relative. Negotiating leverage in coalition agreements and divvying up cabinet positions is all about who has the numbers. Unless you are Winston Peters in which case you might be knee high to a grasshopper and out-negotiating a party three times your size.
Possibly the biggest challenge, beyond even if National likes the idea, is the logistics of coordination. The strategy works beautifully on a spreadsheet because spreadsheets are not, as I remarked in another piece this week, “monkeys with WiFi”. Human beings are harder to wrangle than cats.
How many National supporters would actually be willing to surrender the party vote? Which minor party should receive it? What happens if polling shifts dramatically in October? What happens if a substantial number of voters decide that, having given their party vote to ACT, they may as well vote for the ACT candidate too?
A strategy designed to exploit National’s electorate strength could, if communicated badly, start eroding the very electorate strength it depends upon. It is difficult to persuade voters to distinguish between “National the party” and “National the vehicle through which we elect local MPs”. Asking supporters to become amateur electoral strategists is risky.
Which brings us to perhaps the most divisive the part of The Brash Strategy… If it is successful, National’s list gets obliterated. Completely. For the overhang to be created National has to win more electorate seats than its party vote entitles it to. You cannot simultaneously manufacture a giant National overhang and preserve a healthy National list intake. The two things are simply mutually exclusive.
For some, this spells utter disaster and rules out The Brash Strategy as an option because National has some rather important people relying on that list. Nicola Willis and Gerry Brownlee are standing list-only in 2026. Paul Goldsmith may as well have been list-only as he is in Epsom where David Seymour will win. However, the sudden vacancy created by Chris Penk’s departure from Kaipara ki Mahurangi has produced speculation about whether he could somehow find his way into one of the safest National seats in the country. And then Chris Bishop looks set to lose Hutt South back to Labour meaning he will rely on a list spot as well.
Under a fully realised The Brash Strategy these three senior ministers and the Speaker of the House would be gone. If National even accepts that the strategy has merit they are effectively saying they are willing to sacrifice some of their key personnel.
For some voters, of course, this is not a bug. Actually, scratch that. For some in the National Party, including its caucus, this is not a bug.
There are certainly more conservative portions of the party in and out of parliament who would be quite happy to see the liberal caucus mortally wounded by losing Willis and Bishop. There are those who have not been fans of Gerry Brownlee’s style of House management and who might gladly bid him adieu. And Goldsmith has attracted criticism for his managerial rather than reformist style too. Basically, it is doubtful there will be a shortage of people on the right who say, “You had me at wipe out the National list.”
Quite frankly, there is a not so small number of voters who would regard replacing a collection of senior National MPs with another dozen ACT and New Zealand First MPs as the principal attraction rather than unfortunate collateral damage. That puts National’s leadership in the tricky situation of perhaps not wanting to draw too much public attention to precisely who would disappear under this strategy in case the very idea gives it more legs.
Willis, Bishop, and Goldsmith’s power, influence, strategic leadership, political nous, and key portfolios are reasons for them to be both protected and for them to go depending on who you ask. Regardless, losing several senior ministers would leave a victorious National Party that has hollowed out its own upper ranks.
Strategic voting cannot, therefore, be reduced to the cheerful slogan that every party vote for ACT or New Zealand First “helps the coalition”. It may help the coalition numerically while profoundly changing what that coalition is. That may be exactly what some voters want, but they should understand what they are buying.
Likewise, a Te Pāti Māori voter giving Labour the party vote should know they are not merely performing a clever mathematical trick. They are strengthening Labour relative to Te Pāti Māori. They are helping determine which party has more potential ministers, more negotiating power, and more authority to claim a mandate after the election.
Strategic voting always has a price. It is just that this election has us finally talking openly about that price. For years we have had an oddly infantilising culture around MMP voting where commentators tut whenever voters discuss tactical arrangements. Politicians insist elections should be about policies rather than “numbers and overhangs”, as Willie Jackson put it, despite the small problem that elections are literally mechanisms for turning numbers into parliamentary power. Of course voters should think about the numbers.
There is nothing dirty about strategic voting. People do it under every electoral system on Earth, MMP merely gives voters more variables to play with. The problems arise when rules create outcomes that begin to defeat the stated purpose of the system itself. MMP is supposed to produce proportional representation with the party vote as king. If sophisticated vote-splitting can deliberately create a 140-seat parliament in which one bloc has accumulated a giant overhang through electorate victories while simultaneously diverting its party votes elsewhere, then we have wandered some distance from the intuitive meaning of proportional representation. In theory.
If Te Pāti Māori successfully uses the Māori electorates to generate an overhang while its supporters boost Labour and the Greens, the right will scream bloody murder. If right-wing voters successfully use National electorate candidates to generate an enormous overhang while flooding ACT and New Zealand First with party votes, the left will suddenly discover a passionate interest in electoral reform. Both will accuse the other of manipulating democracy and both will be correct in one sense and ridiculous in another.
We are all manipulating the system. That is what electoral strategy is. I believe the saying goes “don’t hate the player, hate the game”. We should question whether the system should make manipulation so rewarding, but for the moment, these are the rules and voters are entitled to use them.
Thirty years of MMP, and New Zealanders may finally have worked out that the two votes really are two votes. The parties may come to regret teaching us that.
This article was originally published by Thought Crimes.
