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How New Zealand Changed Their Voting System

Politicians or used-car salespeople: Who do you trust more? New Zealanders polled in 1990 were hard pressed to name a preference. Decades of economic uncertainty mixed with broken election promises had left people frustrated with their political representatives, their Parliament, and their two-party system. In 1993, they voted to change their electoral system.

British Columbia faced much the same question in 2018. I wrote this case study in plain language to help readers understand how New Zealand voted to change their electoral system from First-Past-The-Post to Mixed-Member-Proportional Representation.