Perspective with Heather du Plessis-Allan: Will National's vote-splitting strategy just confuse voters?

Jeez, I reckon it'll be panic stations in National that we're yet again talking about the vote-splitting strategy because this, I think, is now definitely confusing voters.

I don't know if the people pushing this strategy realise how confusing it is for a lot of people, particularly those who don't engage with politics all that often. These are the low-interest voters who tune in only when an election rolls around.

I tried to explain the vote-splitting strategy to someone in my family twice and I could tell that even after two explanations, they still didn't really understand how it worked. That suspicion was confirmed when they called me again and asked me to explain it one more time because they were on their way to the voting booth and wanted to try to execute the strategy.

Now, add to that the fact that voters are hearing two different messages from elders on the right. Don Brash is telling them to split their vote. John Key is telling them not to split their vote. Then Don Brash is saying, "Please split your vote, except if you're in Epsom or Tamaki. Then please don't split your vote."

I think this confusion really raises the risk that the strategy could go badly wrong because, if voters don't understand what they're doing, what happens if they invert their vote in the booth? What happens if they accidentally give their party vote to National and their electorate vote to New Zealand First or ACT, completely defeating the thing they're trying to do?

And what if only half the voters do it and half don't? National's party vote collapses but its electorate vote also collapses and it comes out not supersized at all but quite the opposite.

Don Brash is confident, though, that voters can pull this off. He says National is denigrating the intelligence of right-wing voters. And maybe he's right. We've had MMP for 30 years now. Electorate after electorate, from Wellington Central to Coromandel to Epsom, has shown that voters do know how to split their vote.

But this is vote-splitting on steroids across the whole country and it's a big enough gamble for National to be fairly nervous about the coming days.

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