the Electoral Commission really, really wanted to significantly reduce the representation threshold in the name of "democracy". Hell, let's even imagine that it had consisted of Bryce Edwards, Idiot Savant and myself (who submitted to the review that the threshold should be set at 2.5%) ... three individuals who favour placing a much lower hurdle in the path of parties seeking to enter the parliamentary realm. Then, through the process of public submissions, we are confronted with the reality of what the New Zealand public thinks its electoral system ought to look like. We see that most of those submitting to us think that there should be a representation threshold set at a figure far higher than we personally favour. And we receive a submission from the New Zealand Election Study, reporting on its findings from successive post-election surveys of voters that: We anticipate that some submissions to this Review will advocate a move to ?extreme PR? by the complete removal or more radical reduction of the threshold. But such a change could be inconsistent with the popular mandate of approval for MMP in the 2011 referendum. NZES data also suggests it would run against the grain of public preferences. And that: We infer that most New Zealanders would prefer to retain a threshold and that, if anything, it should be tightened rather than loosened. Here's the dilemma that we would then face. Our view of what "democracy" requires by way of a representation threshold conflicts with the actually held