Kerre Woodham: Strategic voting – is it really a clever decision?

There's an old saying, "you're so sharp you could cut yourself". Similar to "you're too clever for your own good", meaning sometimes a person tries to be too tricky or clever, which leads them to make a simple task messy or fail completely. And that is the warning being given by the main parties to voters who are trying to rig the system.  

To be fair, Te Pāti Māori started it this election with the message to their voters in the Māori electorates to give the party their candidate vote, while leaving the party vote entirely up to the individual voter. The understanding being, of course, that anyone voting for a Te Pāti Māori candidate in the Māori seats will be voting for a party from the left block. That strategy could lead to the creation of an overhang where there are more seats in Parliament, and following the message from Te Pāti Māori, more seats in Parliament for a left block. Now supporters of the Coalition Government are asking their voters to do the same thing, split their votes in order to get an overhang. An overhang happens when a party wins more electorate seats than its share of the party vote should entitle it to. This grows the size of Parliament and skews its proportionality. It means the shape of Parliament does not reflect the overall party vote. Don Brash was the first to call for National voters to give their electorate vote to National and party vote ACT or New Zealand First.  

Harry Mowbray, father of the rich listers, is trying to get a campaign going to do the same thing. If you heard him on Heather du Plessis Allan last night, you'd have heard him explaining how it works. The maths wasn't mathsing for me when I listened to Harry. My brain was trying to crunch the numbers, and the cogs weren't working when I was listening, but my young boss said, well just look at Te Pāti Māori, there's the overhang. The party vote does not entitle them to any seats in Parliament, but they have six electorate seats. When it comes to National, basically it means that if National's going to, according to Harry's calculations, get all of its electorate seats, the party vote would just entitle it to those same electorate seats, whereas if you party vote for New Zealand First or ACT, it will give them more seats that they couldn't get through an electorate.  

Henry Cooke in the Post has a piece outlining Harry Mowbray's attempt to game the political system. And I like Henry's writing, but the editorial starts, "there's an attempt, a very nascent one, from a very rich right wing man to fundamentally skew the New Zealand election." Well yes, but there's nothing in there about Te Pāti Māori, who, without resorting to seven-year-old playground tactics, started it. Where's the mention about Te Pāti Māori's call to its party faithful? Come on Henry, be fair. There's also a call, a very nascent one, from very left leaning Te Pāti Māori politicians to fundamentally skew the New Zealand election. You could have started the column just like that. So they're both doing it. The fact that we have a political system that allows this is just a nonsense. It just shows the flaws of MMP. It also, and that was something Willie Jackson pointed out and it's something that New Zealand First Winston Peters pointed out, puts the Māori seats at risk. If you're going to play silly buggers was their message, you'll lose the seats.  

It's all too complicated for me really. I get where voters are annoyed with National. They might think that National hasn't gone far enough, and that's what happened to Labour. Labour had the opportunity to bring in sweeping reformist change with their absolute majority. They chose not to, they chose to squander that, so their supporters were really grumpy and flounced off to the minor parties. If you're a bit cross, but you like your electorate MP who happens to be National, you vote National and then say, oh, I'm going to give my party vote to ACT, that'll toughen them up, that'll teach them a lesson. But doing that sometimes, as Sir John Key warned, can give you unintended consequences and can mean that you are being so sharp you'll cut yourself, and then you'll be sorry. Is anybody thinking that they're being clever, or is it just pure emotion? You're grumpy with the way your party's performed, be it Labour or National, so you're going to give your party vote to the minor parties like the Greens, like ACT, to give them a bit more grunt in coalition talks, or you're trying to be clever and play the system.