CLAIRE DEEKS: Stop the Press! New Zealanders Have Discovered How MMP Works

New Zealanders have two votes. Apparently, explaining what to do with them requires a character reference.

Over the past fortnight, our Vote Smart 2026 campaign has caused something approaching a collective nervous breakdown among sections of New Zealand’s political commentariat. They have had a great deal to say about what sort of people we are. The electoral arithmetic has had to compete for attention.

We’ve been accused of “gaming” the electoral system, “cheating”, undermining democracy and engineering a constitutional crisis. The Post’s Janet Wilson has described the behaviour of vote-splitting advocates as “nihilistic entitlement” and “morally dubious” and the controversy as a “grenade into the guts of democracy”.

Commentator Simon Wilson has called RCR “far-right provocateurs”, described us as a haven for “anti-vaxxers, racists, misogynists, climate denialists and other far-right conspiracists”, and accused those involved in the overhang campaign of conspiring to manipulate the election.

Bryce Edwards, director of the Democracy Project and publisher of Democracy Briefing, has said organised efforts to engineer an overhang “deserve condemnation”.

The Post’s political editor Henry Cooke described the Don Brash advertorial we ran as “pushing right-wing voters to game the system by creating an overhang”. When challenged, he clarified: “splitting your vote is not gaming the system. Intentionally campaigning to create a disproportionate overhang is.”Meanwhile, veteran journalist Richard Harman introduced us to readers of POLITIK with the headline “The anti-vaxers trying to skew the vote”, while the publication’s Facebook page described us as “nutty” and an “anti-vax mob”.

Former Labour MP Lianne Dalziel has been searching for our “shadowy backers”, while Jonathan Milne has contemplated the possibilities of billionaire-funded political influence and hidden election spending.

This is hardly new territory. The Otago Daily Times previously ran an unsigned editorial headed “‘Cancer’ undermining democracy”. Having quoted the description, it added: “Indeed”.

Such a lovely collection of descriptions from people who profess great concern about the tone and integrity of public discourse.

With all the newspaper columns, radio segments and television reports dedicated to questioning our motives, our character and our supposed threat to democracy, you might reasonably assume that something truly extraordinary had happened.

Perhaps we’d been caught tampering with ballot papers. Or discovered a way to vote three times. Or persuaded the Electoral Commission to abandon the rules and make up some new ones just for us.

But no. We’ve been explaining that New Zealanders have two votes under MMP, showing how those votes work, and encouraging people to consider using them strategically. The horror.

Of course, there is a serious debate to be had about deliberately producing an overhang. It can reduce proportionality, and critics are entitled to argue that this cuts against the purpose of MMP. Fine. Let’s have that debate. But let’s do it without confusing campaigns, inventing motives or treating a catalogue of insults as a substitute for analysis. And perhaps, somewhere amongst all the speculation, someone might even think to ask us what we’re actually doing.

Democracy is wonderful, provided the voters don’t get too clever

Under MMP, the party vote determines a qualifying party’s proportional entitlement to seats in Parliament. The electorate vote determines who represents a particular electorate. However, if a party wins more electorate seats than its party vote would ordinarily entitle it to, it retains those electorate MPs. Parliament expands to accommodate them. That’s the overhang.

This is not a loophole that we discovered while rummaging through the Electoral Act one rainy afternoon. It has been part of MMP since New Zealand adopted the system in 1996. Overhangs have occurred before. The rules are public. Parliament knows they exist. And voters are entitled to split their votes.

Former judge David Harvey put the matter rather well in his recent Reflections on an Election when he said: “What seems to have been forgotten is that our votes are not their votes.” Quite.

The strongest objection to our campaign is not that splitting votes is unlawful. It is that deliberately organising voters to produce an overhang can give a political bloc more seats than its combined party-vote share would otherwise deliver. That is a legitimate criticism. It is also a criticism that applies regardless of which political bloc stands to benefit.

At its August campaign launch, the Maori Party made its approach clear: electorate votes for its candidates, with party votes available to parties in the left bloc. The party has already benefited from an overhang. It is now promoting a strategy that could produce another and help its potential governing partners replace the current government.

Edwards, whilst condemning both campaigns, draws a moral distinction between individuals splitting their votes and organised campaigns deliberately seeking an overhang. Cooke makes much the same distinction.

So an individual using the rules strategically is legitimate democracy. Organising others to pursue the same lawful electoral outcome is something politicians ought to condemn. I would genuinely like to know where they draw the line.

Is it acceptable if I explain strategic voting to my mother? What about my neighbours? Could I tell twenty people at a barbecue, or would that amount to an organised attempt to undermine proportional representation?

At what point does a lawful explanation become an affront to democracy? When it reaches a thousand people? Ten thousand? Or only when it becomes sufficiently persuasive to make political commentators uncomfortable?

Edwards also discussed Henry Cooke’s proposal that the major-party leaders promise to seek another election rather than take office through an overhang-produced majority. He acknowledged that another election under the same rules might reproduce the result.

Say what? New Zealanders cast lawful votes under rules Parliament enacted, and one of the solutions being seriously entertained is to ask them to vote again. Presumably, this time with clearer instructions about the answer they’re supposed to give. It’s an extraordinary proposition to advance in the name of protecting democracy.

Strategic voting: perfectly respectable until the public joins in

The idea that organised strategic voting is some dreadful new right-wing innovation would be more convincing if New Zealand’s political leaders hadn’t spent the past thirty years encouraging it.

In 1996, at our first MMP election, Jim Bolger publicly signalled support for ACT’s Richard Prebble in Wellington Central, despite National having its own candidate.

Similarly, in 1999, Labour leader Helen Clark signalled support for Green co-leader Jeannette Fitzsimons in Coromandel, despite Labour having its own candidate. The political calculation was hardly mysterious: Labour supporters could retain their party vote while helping a potential parliamentary ally win an electorate.

Then there is Epsom, where the relationship between National and ACT has turned strategic electorate voting into something approaching an electoral tradition. Rodney Hide won Epsom in 2005 and again in 2008. John Key famously enjoyed a cup of tea with John Banks in 2011. Nobody seriously imagined they had gathered to discuss the quality of Auckland’s flat whites.

These arrangements were not the same as deliberately producing an overhang. They do establish that organised encouragement to split votes is hardly a new affront to democracy. 

Hide reminded readers how familiar split voting ought to be. “The good people of Epsom have done that for seven elections in a row,” he wrote in his recent column, Two votes, use them. Strategic voting has been an ordinary part of political calculation when party leaders and their advisers were doing the calculating.

Plenty about us. Rather less from us.

You might expect a campaign attracting this much scrutiny to have spent the fortnight answering questions from journalists. But among the writers discussed here, only Richard Harman sought our account of how the Vote Smart 2026 campaign came about and was funded. There has been considerably less hesitation about describing our character.

My co-founder, Alia Bland, addressed this rather neatly in an open letter to the mainstream media yesterday on X and Facebook, titled You Could Have Just Asked:

“You’ve interviewed politicians, speculated about who’s paying for it all, and devoted plenty of airtime and column inches to what our campaign might mean for Saturday’s election. And yet, amongst all this breathless reporting, something rather obvious seems to have escaped you. You’ve barely bothered to speak to the people who actually came up with the campaign.”

Alia also explained what seems to have become an extraordinarily difficult distinction for some journalists to grasp. Vote Smart was conceived and developed by the two of us in August. Harry Mowbray made a donation on 18 October, when the campaign was already well underway. His contribution represents approximately 2% of our confirmed campaign costs. We are grateful for it, but he neither conceived nor organised our campaign, and his separate Split Your Vote initiative is exactly that. Separate.

Yet reporting about Mr Mowbray’s separate website, the Electoral Commission’s inquiries and National’s complaint has repeatedly been presented alongside our advertising, leaving readers to work out for themselves which campaign is actually being discussed.

As Alia put it: “We didn’t need a billionaire to tell us what to think, say, or do”.

That possibility seems harder for some commentators to contemplate than the existence of an elaborate billionaire-funded conspiracy.

Some people’s participation is more democratic than others

In his 28 October POLITIK blog, Richard Harman described Rodney Hide, Don Brash and Maurice Williamson as “fringe right-wing figures”, which I guess is one way of introducing three former senior politicians, two of whom led political parties in Parliament.

Apparently, before readers can consider the mathematics of MMP, they need to be warned about the people explaining it.

Harman, to his credit, did publish our explanation of the campaign’s independent origins and fundraising. Yet he concluded by asking where the money was “really coming from”. Perhaps an organisation raising money from its own supporters was simply too mundane an explanation.

Janet Wilson’s contribution has been no less colourful. She has described aspects of the vote-splitting campaign as “morally dubious”, invoked “nihilistic entitlement”, and presented the affair as an “undemocratic sideshow” and a potential “democratic crisis”.

And she referred to me personally as the “fervid anti-vaxxer” behind VFF and RCR.

I suppose that’s progress. For years we’ve been accustomed to being called feral anti-vaxxers. Fervid sounds positively respectable by comparison. 

My views about the Covid years are evidently sufficient to tell readers everything they need to know about the merits of a mathematical argument concerning electoral law. It’s a curious method of political analysis.

My background as a lawyer doesn’t make my interpretation of MMP automatically correct, any more than my views on Covid policy make it automatically wrong.

Janet Wilson’s approach to political participation is particularly interesting because she was also writing about VFF-associated candidates standing in local elections back in 2022. Their participation caused her considerable concern, notwithstanding the importance she placed on citizens engaging with the issues and informing themselves about candidates.

What I find difficult to take seriously is the implication that participation is an admirable civic duty when undertaken by the approved people, but a dangerous threat to democracy when undertaken by people the commentariat dislikes.

Disagree with our figures. Challenge our assumptions. Debate our preferred outcome. But calling us names does not demonstrate that our arithmetic is wrong. But calling us names does not demonstrate that our arithmetic is wrong. Nor does calling an organisation far-right answer the question of whether its campaign is lawful, independent or factually accurate.

If you don’t like the rules, change them. Don’t vilify the voters.

Parliament has had ample opportunity to address overhangs. The Electoral Commission’s 2012 review and the Independent Electoral Review in 2023 considered changes to the treatment of overhangs. The provisions allowing overhangs remain. Invoking the “spirit of MMP” does not create an additional electoral rule that voters are obliged to follow.

For this election, the rules are the rules Parliament has in place. If they produce consequences Parliament considers unacceptable, Parliament can change them for future elections through the proper process. What voters cannot reasonably be expected to do is treat an available electoral choice as forbidden because some commentators have decided it should be. 

If National wins more electorate seats than its party vote entitles it to, it keeps those electorate MPs. Party votes that leave National within that overhang deliver no additional National MPs. Giving those party votes to a qualifying coalition partner can instead increase that partner’s representation. Of course it is not a guarantee. It depends on the final electorate results, party-vote totals and allocation of seats. 

Political commentators Liam Hehir and David Farrar have offered a different criticism, arguing that shifting party votes away from National may undermine the party’s longer-term interests. That is a political judgement voters can weigh. It is not the same as suggesting that people explaining the option are corrupting democracy.

Peter Williams has questioned National’s apparent expectation that coalition government should preserve its control of Cabinet positions. Rodney Hide has explained strategic voting from the perspective of someone who has benefited from it, while David Harvey has emphasised that voters’ legal rights do not disappear simply because politicians dislike the consequences.

We have published explanations, interviews, competing views and material voters can examine for themselves. They are free to find our case persuasive or reject it entirely. 

This is why we built RCR

There is a reason we created Reality Check Radio, alongside tens of thousands of New Zealanders who felt marginalised and unheard.

We wanted somewhere people could put an argument, question a policy and hear a discussion without first being reduced to a label. Watching this campaign being reported has reminded me exactly why we thought that necessary.

If journalists don’t ask us, their readers don’t get to hear our account. And if they confuse our work with somebody else’s, attribute motives they haven’t established and introduce us with a string of insults, they’ve done rather more than disagree.

They’ve told their audience what to think of us before allowing them to consider what we have to say.

As David Harvey reminds us, those seeking our votes are not our masters. They are supposed to represent us.

Political parties can persuade, but they cannot dictate. Nor does the commentariat get to decide which citizens are entitled to organise, campaign or explain the electoral rules.

Whatever happens tomorrow, Vote Smart 2026 has brought a relatively obscure feature of MMP into the national conversation. People are asking questions about how their votes work, what the rules mean and whether those rules ought to change. I had rather assumed that was something a healthy democracy should welcome.

As for us, we’ll keep doing what we built RCR to do: asking the questions others won’t. You can dislike our politics. You can dislike our campaign. You can even dislike us. But you don’t get to misrepresent us, deny us a hearing and then lecture us about the integrity of public debate. 

Because the votes belong to the voters.

Claire Deeks is a registered patent attorney and a qualified barrister and solicitor of the High Court of New Zealand with more than a decade’s experience practising in commercial litigation. She is co-founder of Voices for Freedom and Reality Check Radio (RCR Media). RCR Media is the registered third-party promoter responsible for Vote Smart 2026.