November 19, 2020
Opinion: The Maori Party are right – our elections are racist!
Martyn 'Bomber' Bradbury: There is a glaring problem inside our electoral system, it's a structural bias that penalises Māori in a way that Pakeha are not.
It's the enrollment onto the Māori roll that is deeply flawed.
Māori can only change to the Māori roll once every 5 years, unlike Pakeha who can enrol and vote right up to and including on election day itself.
If all Māori were enrolled on the Māori roll, there would be about 13 or 14 Māori electorates so this structural block to limit Māori moving from the general roll to the Māori roll specifically compromises Māori political aspirations.
The main problem from moving from the MEO (Māori Electoral Option) to a system you can enroll on the day will be the argument that this might warp the size of the Māori electorates, but seeing as we allow for a 5% mathematical distortion anyway this seems a weak defence of the current system if the point of the system is to promote Māori political representation.
The current system represses Māori political representation.
The Electoral Commission recommended these changes in 2017 to allow Māori to change between the two with the same ease as Pakeha do.
Nothing has happened since Labour came to power.
Martyn Bradbury
Editor – TheDailyBlog.nz
twitter.com/CitizenBomber
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