Wednesday, August 31, 2005



Tactical voting in Epsom

Aaron Bhatnagar has the results of a push poll which show Rodney Hide statistically tied in Epsom. As he notes, the questions could be leading (though ACT hacks in his comments deny it), but regardless it should sharpen the minds of Labour voters in that seat. As Rodney is constantly reminding people, a victory in Epsom means he and maybe some friends (such as Heather Roy, Muriel Newman and Stephen Franks) get to stay in Parliament. I think stopping that from happening is an excellent reason to cast a candidate vote for Richard Worth.

7 comments:

I/S.
If we had STV voting, would that mean that tactical voting would not be necessary for the electorate vote?

Posted by Anonymous : 8/31/2005 02:03:00 PM

Good call.

ACTs advertising here in Wellington is a disgrace.

Good riddance to bad rubbish.

Posted by Anonymous : 8/31/2005 02:43:00 PM

Global Guy: pretty much. And adding preferences to the electorate vote is one of the more obvious ways of tweaking MMP.

Posted by Idiot/Savant : 8/31/2005 03:04:00 PM

National voters may actually hurt their party long term by not putting ACT to the sword in this election.

One could ask the question whether the fragmentation of the left vote (ie maori/green/UF etc) doesn't result in a rightward movement of the major parties as well as the potental for labour to shed the far left contingent when required.

Posted by Genius : 8/31/2005 07:46:00 PM

It's NOT a push poll. It has a high margin of error (5%) but it is otherwise the result of asking a straight "which candidate would you vote for if the election were held today" question.

Posted by Blair : 8/31/2005 10:40:00 PM

I'm still in favor of better the devil you know. I might not like act but considering who else might fill the void left by act (destiny new zealand being a contender in the long term) perhaps keeping a relatively sane right wing party as the nats coalition partner might not be such a bad thing.

Posted by Stephanie : 9/02/2005 12:02:00 AM

Um... Labour voters in Epsom?
Huh?

Posted by Anonymous : 9/02/2005 12:08:00 AM