Some election night notes

Written By: - Date published: 7:01 pm, September 23rd, 2017 - 15 comments
Categories: democratic participation, election 2017, electoral systems, MMP - Tags:

Regarding when we should know a result. It depends on how close it is. If it’s close then the Special votes will be crucial (the Greens have been known to pick up an extra MP from the Specials for instance).  Advance votes where the person enrolled at the same time are classed as Special votes and we won’t have them counted tonight. Special vote results and final election results will be released on October 7.

Counting of normal Advanced votes started during Saturday and it’s expected there will be some results available pretty soon after 7pm. It’s possible these will give an indication for how the election will go (and this has been true in past elections), but I think given this has been the volatile election it might not be that straightforward. The Spinoff looks at the election night issues,

So, the point is: a lot of advanced voting. That was anticipated and planned for; indeed, the rules were changed to allow those votes to be counted from Saturday morning. We’ll be getting results, a lot of them, being progressively plugged into the system from electorates around the country from just after 7pm. There’s every chance that within minutes we’ll know enough to start drawing conclusions. Last time around it took an hour or so until there was anything to get your teeth into. The Electoral Commission says all advanced votes should be revealed by 8.30pm (with 50% of on-the-day voting places by 10pm and the rest by 11:30pm), but the bulk of those early votes could be a whole lot sooner. And with such a huge proportion coming this way, it could be all over, very soon.

The Electoral Commissions results website will have live updates here. Final non-Special votes will be available by 11.30pm. Previous election results can be found here.

The Spinoff also has an overview of what to look out for re electorates, that included this generality about what is needed to win the election,

If the Greens and NZ First both get 5% or more on the night, National and Labour will be looking to control around 47% or more of the vote on the night, in order to form a government. If either the Greens or NZ First fails to make the 5% threshold, that golden victory target will drop to about 45%. If they both fail to make it back into parliament, it will be somewhere in the low 40s. See here for more on how to count the votes and here on what will be happening on the night.

There’s been some discussion about which of the larger parties will get a crack at forming government. No, the largest party doesn’t have first dibs. Dr Dean Knight, a senior Law lecturer at Victoria University, writes at The Newsroom about how governments are formed post-election. It looks at the importance of Confidence and Supply,

A series of carefully worded constitutional speeches by successive Governors-General, subsequently reflected in the Cabinet Manual, has clarified the relevant principles and processes. The basic rule is a simple one. The prime minister and their government must command the confidence of the House. As one Governor-General explained it, “the Governor-General will always appoint as Prime Minister the person who has been identified through the government formation process as the person who will lead the party or group of parties that appears able to command the confidence of the House of Representatives”.

Confidence is the lifeblood of a government. It is its mandate to govern, expressed by the MPs in the House on our behalf. In practical terms, it means having a majority of votes on certain important votes in Parliament. These votes include express motions of confidence or no confidence (such a motion is usually moved in the Address-in-Reply debate – the first debate of each new Parliament) and votes on the Budget and other money bills (without parliamentary approval to spend money, the government can’t function).

The government must survive these key votes, otherwise it loses its mandate. Thus, in order to be appointed Prime Minister, Bill English or Jacinda Ardern must get at least 61 of the 120 MPs elected to the House willing to express confidence in their proposed government. Slightly more might be required if there is an overhang (that is, if a party wins more electorate seats than the number of seats in the House it would be entitled to based on its party vote) where the size of Parliament is more than 120 MPs. Slightly fewer might be required if a party agrees to abstain on matters of confidence. This target – a majority in the House on matters of confidence – has been explained by Governors-General as the quantity dimension.

It also explains clarity,

The other dimension is clarity. Convention dictates that party leaders provide clear, public statements on their intentions on matters of confidence following the completion of negotiations.

What I take from that is there are conventions in how this is done, but there are also a range of options depending on what gets negotiated which in turn depend on numbers. If we don’t have a distinct result tonight, I’m hoping in the days to come we will get some good lay-person explanations of how this works, because I seem to remember previous elections it’s been anything but clear.

The only other thing I’m really noting right now is the number of people I’m seeing expressing quite serious election stress. I’ve called this election the most important of my lifetime (I first voted in 1984) and it’s also at times seemed like a do or die one. If we don’t get a change of government the implications are incredibly serious, but I also think that will be opportunity there to organise in ways we haven’t seen for a long time. On the other hand, it we do get a change of government, we should also be organising to keep our new government honest. Mostly right now I’m thinking it doesn’t have to be this stressful, so at some point we might want to look at why it has been and rethink how we want to politics in this country.

15 comments on “Some election night notes ”

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  1. Carolyn_nth 1
    23 September 2017 at 7:07 pm

    Whoa! at 1.1% of votes counted, the results look much like the last few opinion polls.

  2. tracey 2
    23 September 2017 at 8:38 pm

    Anecdotedly RNZ is saying otago uni students voted nat or TOP. I smell the understandable influence of family. Alot of those students are Aucklanders and Wellingtonians

    • weka 2.1
      23 September 2017 at 11:48 pm

      Yeah, it was the flat party that the RNZ reporter was at. Pretty sure they could have found a flat that voted left too. It was a shocking anecdote though, all the students voting against Labour because they didn’t like Labour’s education policy, wtf?

    • Peter 2.2
      24 September 2017 at 7:13 am

      No surprise here. The students who can afford to leave home and go to Otago Uni generally come from wealthier sectors of NZ.

      • KJT 2.2.1
        24 September 2017 at 7:31 am

        The ones who get the student allowance anyway, because of tax dodging Dad.

        And who make a profit on re-investing the student loan payments.

  3. Violet 3
    23 September 2017 at 9:43 pm

    And good old selfishness. I didn’t get it free why should they. Found it myself from older women when pregnant. I didn’t get paid maternity leave, neither should you.

    • weka 3.1
      23 September 2017 at 11:49 pm

      That’s dividing line in NZ I think.

    • Psycho Milt 3.2
      24 September 2017 at 8:41 am

      It’s a strong theme in NZ society. I remember when I was in high school in the 1970s a new principal got all got all the boys together in a room (easy enough, it was an area school so there were only a few dozen of us) and said he wasn’t going to tolerate bullying of incoming third-formers. One of his pupils spoke up and said that was unfair because they’d been through bullying as third-formers so it would be wrong for future ones to escape it. Made a big impression on me at the time, and a valuable one as that level of moral-compass failure seems to be quite common.

  6. JC 6
    24 September 2017 at 1:05 am

    “New Zealand is a land of Bullies. While many New Zealanders are good caring people it is a bullying culture that leads and governs us. The evidence for this came out strongly in the recent Unicef report. We have the 2nd highest rate of bullying in schools out of 51 countries and if anyone disputes this they can try and explain why we have the highest levels of youth suicide in the world.

    ocalbodies-bsprout.blogspot.co.nz/2017/09/post-truth-politics-works-for-national.html

  7. Carolyn_nth 7
    24 September 2017 at 8:32 am

    I went to bed quite early, tired after a day’s work, realising the results were not going to change much, and somewhat depressed.

    Today’s another day.

    The results didn’t change much but:

    With NZ First in a dominant position (which ever government it decides) that means:

    ACT is dead. (Winston don’t have much time for Seymour)

    And probably neoliberalism is dead:

    English and Winston are old school conservative; Winston has talked against corporate power for a long time; and against the TPP.

    NZ First policies:

    Repeal the amendments to the Education Act 1989 that allowed the creation of Charter Schools at the same time as reviewing Section 156 of the Designated Character Schools section within the same Act.

    Oppose investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) provisions in bilateral and multilateral agreements and by extension the Trans Pacific Partnership-11, which offers little for our exporters.

    Don’t seem to be for building loads more state houses though. And the Maori seats are a worry.

    Nevertheless, and Arder-led government would not likely be that radical either, especially with NZ First in the House.