Election Day in NZ

As you can see it is election day here in New Zealand and we went out this morning to cast our vote. The shot on the bottom right is John just coming out of the building after casting his vote. We are not aloud to take any shots inside the building but I did get this one, on left, just as I went in. The flowers looked so good this morning as we left home catching the morning light, so had to put them into this collage for a bit of cheer.

So far the bad weather is passing us by and it has been beautiful day. There are some really dark looking clouds lurking to the west just now, so our good luck may have run out!

In New Zealand, we vote using the MMP voting system - Mixed Member Proportional. It is a proportional system, which means that the proportion of votes a party gets will largely reflect the number of seats it has in parliament.

Each voter gets two votes. The first vote is for the political party the voter chooses. This is called the party vote and largely decides the total number of seats each political party gets in Parliament.

The second vote is to choose the MP the voter wants to represent the electorate they live in. This is called the electorate vote. The candidate who gets the most votes wins. They do not have to get more than half the votes.

Under current MMP rules, a political party that wins at least one electorate seat OR 5% of the party vote gets a share of the seats in Parliament that is about the same as its share of the party vote.

For example, if a party gets 30% of the party vote it will get roughly 36 MPs in Parliament (being 30% of 120 seats). So if that party wins 20 electorate seats it will have 16 List MPs in addition to its 20 Electorate MPs. Coalitions or agreements between political parties are usually needed before Governments can be formed.