How do you legislate to ban an overhang?
Gag the campaigners and you lose. Remove the reward and the strategy dies.
The waka-jumping law doesn’t police what MPs say. It takes the seat. Overhangs need the same treatment.
An overhang occurs when a party wins more electorates than its party vote earns. It has happened five times. This election, people are trying to engineer one.
Te Paati Maori wants electorate votes only. Its party list has one name. On the right, campaigners want National’s party votes given to ACT or NZ First. National holds 44 electorates while polling 29% or lower. Parliament could reach 130 seats.
I warned in 2013 that politicians abuse the flaws of MMP. The problem now sits at four levels.
First, third-party promoters. Section 204H requires a party secretary’s written permission to promote that party. So one promoter demonstrates with blue, black and pink jelly beans and names nobody.
Close that gap. The definition of an election advertisement already reaches parties merely “described or indicated”. Require sign-off whenever a party is identifiable.
It won’t be enough. ACT and NZ First signed off a Reality Check Radio ad. Permission is no barrier when the beneficiary holds the pen.
Second, the media. Leave them alone. Editorial content is exempt, and should stay exempt. A law against explaining arithmetic would ban this column.
Third, candidates. Paul Henry says to back your local MP and party vote ACT, while ACT denies seeking an overhang. National’s “two ticks” is hardly pure: Paul Goldsmith concedes the list “is not as certain”. No statute can prove intent from a stump speech.
Andrew Geddis is blunt about the strategy: “It’s legal.” Graeme Edgeler explains why it happens: “Parties follow incentives.”
That leaves the fourth level: the seats.
Overseas, Italy, Albania, Lesotho, Venezuela and South Korea were all gamed. Korea’s ruling party condemned the tactic, then copied it. Lesotho’s answer was one vote, no splitting. That removes a choice New Zealanders value.
Topping up other parties fails too. It swelled Germany’s Bundestag to 736 seats. Here, 2023’s two-seat overhang would have needed 169. Five electorates on 0.1% of the party vote would need 5000.
The 2012 Electoral Commission review and 2023 Independent Electoral Review proposed fewer list seats, holding Parliament’s size. That caps the headcount, not the gain. The extra seats come off everyone’s lists, including the engineer’s opponents.
Germany went further. A constituency winner now sits only if party votes cover the seat. The losers are the winners with the lowest vote share, not the lowest list ranking. Its top court upheld the core of the reform.
The flaw: 23 electorates lost their winners in 2025. New Zealand can improve on that. Give the seat to the runner-up, counted against that party’s own entitlement. The electorate keeps an MP. Proportionality holds.
Would that wipe out Te Paati Maori at 0.1%? Only if it keeps starving its own party vote. Ask for both ticks and the problem vanishes. Maori voters could still lose MPs they chose, and Edgeler warns gaming the system could cost the Maori seats anyway.
National would pay for an accidental overhang too. Like waka jumping, the rule judges the result, not the motive.
There is a gentler alternative. Germany discards the party votes of voters who elect a successful independent. Extend that to voters electing overhang MPs. Nobody is unseated or gagged. Honest splitters would be caught, though.
The seat-allocation section isn’t entrenched, so ordinary legislation could change it. But as Geddis notes, it needs the elected majority to “change the result”. Labour and NZ First propose no overhang change.
After the votes are counted, no remedy is clean. Henry Cooke wants the leaders to promise another election if an overhang is the only path to government. Bryce Edwards replies that lawful votes can’t simply be disregarded, and a rerun could repeat the result.
So ask the leaders now, before they know who benefits.
Parliament stopped waka jumping by taking the seat. It can stop this the same way — if the winners dare.
