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NUMBERS GAME A recent news item told us that in General Election in Western Samoa, an estimated 7500 voters turned out to elect 47 members of the Legislative Assembly. Now that is what we call democracy. 7500 voters to 47 members works out on our Japanese calculator (and we assume that Japanese arithmetic is the same as ours, or do they start at ten and count back to one?) at 159.57 voters per member. There must be enormous advantages to such a system. In the first place every voter would be known to all the candidates in any seat personally. This raises, we suppose, the possibility of corruption, but with such a small constituency, any corruption is going to be instantly known about and would have to be equally shared around.

And just think of the sheer ease of counting the results. Presumably the result of Western Samoan elections is

known within about 10 minutes of the polls closing. And even magisterial recounts must only take about 20 minutes or so. While electoral petitions like the one in .Kapiti would be over in an afternoon. There might be some difficulty with the voter who was only .57. Perhaps the best way around his problem would be to allow him only one vote every two elections. In order to achieve the same size of constituency here we would have to vastly increase the number of MPs. We are not quite sure of the size of the New Zealand electorate, a state of doubt we appear to share with the Chief Electoral Officer. But say it is 1,800,000. Then in order to achieve the same sort of representation as Samoa, we would need something like 11,280 MPs. Come to think of it, perhaps it’s not such a good idea after all.

Permanent link to this item
Hononga pūmau ki tēnei tūemi

https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/CHP19790417.2.178

Bibliographic details
Ngā taipitopito pukapuka

Press, 17 April 1979, Page 25

Word count
Tapeke kupu
301

Random reminder Press, 17 April 1979, Page 25

Random reminder Press, 17 April 1979, Page 25

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