Once the redevelopment has been completed, it will be a great drawcard to Whanganui, enhancing the reputation of our city within New Zealand and overseas.
LIBBY WOOD
Past President, Friends of the Sarjeant Gallery
STV rethink
This letter is in reply to letters from Anthony Tuffin and Stephen Todd, published in the Chronicle, Monday, October 16, re Single Transferable Voting (STV) and the 2016 Porirua City mayoral election.
In his letter Stephen Todd is correct in assuming that I misunderstood STV. It is complicated. WDC and staff at the public meeting held to discuss STV struggled to explain how it works.
Steve Barron, an STV advocate, said at that meeting we didn't have to know how it works, just trust the system. He repeated that statement to me a few weeks later, when he phoned me regarding a letter I had written. The STV govt website has many pages explaining how the votes are transferred but the results of those transfers are difficult to understand. However, I had managed to work out what had happened in the Porirua election, but had got bogged down in the problem of how it could be fair that some electors had their second preference votes used but most didn't.
I would like to thank Stephen Todd for contacting me. Seems to take a while for my almost semi-geriatric brain to absorb info these days, but, thanks to his call and emails, I now have a better understanding of STV. His explanation of treating each iteration with the transferred votes as a separate election shows in an obvious way how STV operates.
In the 2016 Porirua Mayoral Election 13,872 electors cast a valid vote. Tana won with 42.44 per cent of the total votes, Murrell lost with 41.26 per cent, of the total votes.
Between them they accounted for 83.7 per cent of the total vote. Under the STV system, 16.3 per cent of electors were removed from the ballot. Those electors didn't suddenly disappear. They were real people, let down by the system. Although they had wasted their first votes, if you had asked them on Election Day, "who out of Tana and Murrell would you vote for?", the answer to that question, added to Tana and Murrell's poll totals, would be the correct result, and accurately reflect the view of the voting Porirua electorate.
Much thinking, discussion, information and debate before the voting system referendum in two years' time?
A message to Anthony Tuffin, Chichester, UK: "From the Antipodes. We're grown-up, mature adults now. Don't need advice from the "Motherland". Put your energy into sorting out your own political mess".
Comments, criticism, advice, whatever: (06) 281 3616.
JOHN CARSON
Springvale
Send your letters to: The Editor, Wanganui Chronicle, 100 Guyton St, PO Box 433, Wanganui 4500; or email editor@wanganuichronicle.co.nz
