Picking the bones

Everyone else is picking over the election results, talking about voter shares, long-term trends, who won and who lost. DPF has an excellent post on the possible effects of special votes, which I'd recommend to anyone wondering which way things might go. He also crunches the numbers on Maori and female MPs, where we've had an increase in both. MMP really does seem to have resulted in better representation, though National is still well behind Labour in terms of "looking like New Zealand".

Frogblog looks at the impact on the minor parties, calling it a "third-party bloodbath". I've prepared the following graph so you can see just how tight the squeeze is:

It also neatly illustrates Span's point about how Labour's vote share has held despite everything National could fling at it.

Frog also comments on the left-right split. Again, here's a graphical representation. The left has basically held steady, with only a slight loss since 1999; most of the right's gains have come from eating the center.

(Note that the above counts the Maori Party as "left". This is arguable, as there's no guarantees that they'll support a left-wing government, but they are composed of people who previously voted Labour, and it is what Frogblog has done).

Finally, a graph of the trend in the "wasted vote" lost to the threshold:

While the decline is good, the story it tells is actually rather depressing, in that this year 98.7% of votes were cast for parties already in Parliament. We've simply learned to stop voting for non-Parliamentary parties, and so they're withering and dying. This is probably bad in the long-term, as it narrows the political meme pool, and it turns the threshold into far more of a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we want to keep our democracy healthy, and keep a robust competition going for people's votes, we need to look at lowering it.