04-07-2025
- Politics
- Otago Daily Times
ORC moving to system where no votes are ‘wasted'
An elections law specialist is urging people not to be too daunted by the Otago Regional Council's decision to switch to a single transferable vote (STV) system for this year's council elections.
The councillors last year approved the shift from first past the post, bringing it in line with the Dunedin City Council, the only one of Otago's five territorial authorities to use the electoral system where voters rank their preferred candidates.
University of Otago political science professor Janine Hayward said Dunedin had been using the system for several years with little difficulty.
"I do think it's a great idea to give voters a little bit more confidence in how straightforward it is."
Under STV, voters rank their preferred candidates from best to last, with "1" being the highest ranking, also known as first preference.
Once the votes are collated, they go through a process called an iteration, where there is a quota each candidate has to reach in order to be elected. Anyone who reaches that quota is declared elected.
"The least popular candidate drops out of the race and their votes are redistributed to the next preference of the people who voted for them.
"If the person who got elected, or the people who got elected, had surplus votes, then those votes are redistributed as well. So what the STV process is ensuring is that there are no votes that are wasted."
Prof Hayward urged people to be careful, if they particularly did not want a candidate to sneak in on redistributed votes.
"Put simply, if you don't like the candidate, don't rank them.
"After first past the post (FPP), there was a tendency among some people to rank every single candidate on the ballot sheet, but really that's unnecessary."
STV avoided the premise of a "wasted vote", Prof Hayward said.
"Votes get wasted in two ways.
"When you're voting for multiple people, they get wasted because too many people vote for somebody, and they get more votes than they needed to get elected, or people vote for somebody who's really unpopular and was never going to get elected.
"So the point about the transferring of the single transferable vote is to keep as many voter preferences alive, basically, as possible until the number of candidates required meet that quota that they're aiming for."
It was also a good indication of the "depth" of someone's voter support, she said.
"When you're doing something like electing Otago Regional Council, it's likely to see somebody or a couple of people elected on first preferences.
"But having a large vote in your first preferences doesn't necessarily mean that you have enough support across the whole community to get elected, and I think that's the point about single transferable vote.
"It really tests, beyond the first vote, whether somebody has the breadth and depth of support that they need to get elected."
Council elections take place from September 9 to October 11.
