This post is realy quite NZ centric so all you yanks who peruse these pages might like to switch off now. I may come back and give some context as to our voting system later but no time at the moment.

So anyway... while it's the Local Body elections soon I've been giving the general election some thought and have some ideas on vote splitting. I'm the kind of person that will be VERY inclined to split my vote because being a TRUE classical liberal I tend towards the economic policy of the right and the social policy of the left.

We really have two different types of voting in Parliament. Party Votes and Concience Votes. Under the MMP system, the party votes will be most influenced by your list vote in the election.

Concience votes on the other hand really depend on a much broader set of factors. As a classical liberal- and by this I mean you're likely to support a free market economy in prostitution- I think that vote splitting (in most electorates) is going to be essential. basically what you want to be trying to achieve is to have a right leraning party (ACT is the obvious example) doing well in the list vote. This is because economic policy generally (almost exclusivly) falls under the guise of party voting. Then you want to give your candidate vote to the most socially liberal candidate in your electorate who has a realistic chance of winning. It doesn't matter if they are Labour, National, ACT or even Watermelon (Green)... overhangs are VERY unlikely in all but the Maori seats so realistically you want to use your candidate vote to influence the makeup of the party caucuses such that each caucus (whose total numbers will be determined by the list vote) contains as many socially liberal candidates as possible.

So what does this mean in practical terms?

Well for some people it will be bloody easy. Live in Epsom? Two ticks Rodney Hide as he is liberal on both arms. But say you lived in a hypothetical electorate where the Labour candidate is a good liberal who supports prostitution/abortion/homosexual law reform while the National Candidate is a died in the wool Catholic... You would have to have ROCKS IN YOUR HEAD not to split your vote for Labour. Remember, tha party vote will determine how many Labour MPs et into parliament. The candidate vote importantly helps to determine who those candidates actually are.