Two of the Anglosphere’s democracies voted last week. One delivered a clear verdict from the people, the other a result shaped by what I call a horrible collection of contrivances. Here’s why the electoral system matters.
“It’s not the voting that’s democracy, it’s the counting.” So said Dotty in Act One of the celebrated comedy Jumpers by the famed Czech British writer Tom Stoppard. This play appears to be about proving the existence of God, but it also contains pearls of psephological wisdom as a bonus. Essentially, it is argued that the electoral system matters because it is through the electoral system that the will of the people is delivered.
There are many cases in electoral history when we might well have said that “the will of the people delivered such-and-such a result”, when instead we might better have said that the unique system operating at the election in question delivered a result that would have been different under another system. The election of Donald Trump to the US presidency in 2016 is the first case that comes to mind.
This article is a tale of four liberal democracies of the Anglosphere. In order of population size the countries are the US, Australia, Ireland and New Zealand. Two had elections last week. Australia held its most recent general election in May 2025, Ireland in November 2024. Two have relatively simple electoral systems, Australia and the US. The other two have proportional representation (PR) systems but of a very different kind of PR.
Ireland has an excellent, genuinely democratic system described as “proportional representation by means of the single transferable vote”, or PR-STV for short. New Zealand has a horrible collection of contrivances known as Mixed Member Proportional or MMP.
Let me start with the US. The aphorism “It’s not the voting that’s democracy, it’s the counting” may well have sounded sensible in 2016 but it sounds nonsensical today. The American people delivered a drubbing to that conceited charlatan Trump. It was the voting that was America’s democracy. Those foreign experts who have called the US a “flawed democracy” have egg on their faces. Let them make trivial complaints about the drawing of congressional maps or the counting of votes. America’s democracy is alive and healthy.
These results were predictable. Indeed, I predicted them in my recent Switzer Daily article “US mid-terms: I’m tipping a Democrat sweep of Congress”. It was first published on 30 September and published again on 2 November. So, let me make another bold prediction. When the November 2028 US presidential result is known we pro-Americans will again celebrate America’s democracy. For those interested in the details of my prediction see my article published in Switzer Daily for 3 March 2025, “The American electoral college bias has disappeared”.
Now to New Zealand, and I begin by saying that I think the election night results will be confirmed as accurate when we know the final results on Friday 27 November. If so, Christopher Luxon has won a second term as prime minister, and my predictions of results so far have been substantially correct, but wrong for Brazil. See my article of 23 October, “Six elections, five weeks, why I’m tipping the right, except in America”.
In New Zealand I take the parties of the right to be National, ACT and NZ First, while parties of the left are Labour, Greens, Opportunity and Te Pāti Māori. On the present count the combined vote for parties of the right is 1,207,431 while that for parties of the left is 1,190,375. In seats there are 67 for the right and 64 for the left. I think I can claim to have made a correct forecast when I predicted that the right would prevail over the left and Luxon would still be prime minister.
Labour’s party vote is 710,330 (29.4%) while that for the National Party is 706,680 (29.2%). There are some commentators who say that a fair result would have been that the two biggest parties have exactly the same number of seats, but the National Party gamed the system to get more seats. I reject that proposition. I say a fair result would have been for National to have 63 seats to Labour’s 42. This is a system ringed about with contrivances. It fully deserves to be gamed.
To be a sensible commentator one needs to know history, so I give my take. The traditional system was the British method of first-past-the-post in single member constituencies, FPP for short. That system became controversial during the seventies, eighties and early nineties. Consequently, a royal commission was appointed composed of learned lawyers and political science academics. It delivered its report in December 1986, a weighty volume of opinions, information and statistics. It was very well received by the commentariat, but I dissented. I condemned the report.
In essence the report said to the NZ people: “Reform the system. Don’t copy Australia. Don’t copy Ireland. Copy Germany.” By contrast I said: “If you must insist on changing the system copy Ireland. Don’t copy the awful Australian Senate system. Don’t copy the Australian House of Representatives system because that would give the same kinds of results you have been criticising. Don’t copy the German system because it is just a horrible collection of contrivances.”
Unsurprisingly, the people of New Zealand rejected my every opinion and, at referendums in September 1992 and November 1993 they decided by solid majorities to accept the entire set of recommendations given by the learned NZ lawyers and political science academics, one of whom, by the way, later became an Australian political science professor, moving from Dunedin to Canberra.
The whole question was reconsidered and in November 2011 the NZ people again, by a large majority, voted for the same MMP system that first operated in 1996. Therefore, the system enjoys democratic legitimacy and should not be changed in any detail, and will not be changed in any detail.
Nevertheless, I think it is worth considering what this 2026 result would now be if the Irish system of PR-STV had been chosen. I think the overall result would have been roughly the same so let’s consider details. The putative Wellington electoral district would have elected five members, and the result would have been two each for Labour and Greens and one for the National Party. Finance minister and deputy leader of the National Party, Nicola Willis, would still be a member of the House of Representatives. The seven Māori seats would have been filled by the Māori voting as one electorate and the result would have been two each for Labour, Te Pāti Māori and Greens and one for National.
When the Irish people went to the polls in November 2024, they knew they were electing 174 members to their lower house, the Dáil. When the Australian people went to the polls in May 2025, they knew they were electing 150 members to their lower house. When the American people went to the polls in November 2026, they knew they were electing 435 members to their House of Representatives.
Contrast all the above to what has happened in New Zealand. Living in Wellington where National won no seats, Willis was relegated to being the top candidate on the party list, the first cab off the rank, so to speak. But that was in an election when no pundit expected the party list contrivance to give a single seat to the National Party. In the Māori seats at this 2026 election the result is five for Te Pāti Māori and two for Labour. In 2023 it was six to one. Like their German equivalents the NZ people did not know how many members they were electing.
In a paragraph above I wrote that “a fair result would have been for National to have 63 seats to Labour’s 42.” Let me explain. The fact is that National has been able to get 42 members directly chosen by the people under the fair system of FPP but Labour only 21. I say it is a fair system because MMP recognises it as such. But let me tell readers how the party list contrivance has distributed its party machine appointments. It is 15 for Labour, 14 for the Green Party, 12 for ACT, 12 for NZ First, and 7 for the Opportunity Party. Not a single list seat has gone to National or Te Pāti Māori, both of which have been left to game the system as best they can.
I say that the party list contrivance should have given 21 seats to both National and Labour, in other words a proportional distribution. My point is that whereas every member of the Irish Dáil is directly chosen by the people only 71 members of the NZ House of Representatives have been directly elected, and National has won twice as many of such members as Labour. So, there is only one thing for me to cheer at this result. MMP has delivered some benefit to National as its reward for getting members directly chosen by the people. So, the National Party deserves to be the biggest party in the House of Representatives and Luxon deserves to continue as prime minister.