Worksheet 1: Voting for your Member of Parliament
Role-Playing Elections/Electoral Campaigns/
Electoral Procedure - How the system works
Find pictures of four people. Suggest one topic each of
them might be concerned about in your school and neighbourhood.
- Level 5: Participating in political process.
- Level 6: Making choices about governing.
Role-playing inside the classroom: MMP
There are two kinds of Members of Parliament under
the MMP voting system Party List MPs and Electorate MPs.
- (20 min) Divide into groups of 3 - 4 students. Choose one
person to act as your group's 'electorate candidate'. As a group,
prepare a two-minute campaign speech about one or more local
issues raised by the people in the pictures you picked.
- (20 min) Choose a Chairperson (possibly the teacher). Present
your campaign speech to the class.
- (10 min) Set up a voting box with a Supervisor. Hand out
voting papers with names of the candidates listed and instructions
about voting procedure. Vote in a secret ballot for the person
in your class to be your electorate MP. The Supervisor counts
the votes and announces the result.
- (5 min) Class discussion about voting procedure. Did everyone
participate? If not, why not?
- Plan how you could get your electorate MP to become a member
of the 'government' give example.
Information about the MMP system is available from
the Electoral Commission
and in DecisionMaker's article on MMP's
first decade in the section on The big picture.
For further reference
Find out more about the MPs from
each party, their photo and links to their background by
searching in DecisionMaker How Parliament works