Monday, October 11, 2004

Why I did not vote at the Local Body Elections


I was all set up to vote. The voting papers arrived stuck inside the junk mail and all I had to do was fill them out and send them off.
Well so I thought.

I finally realised last week they had indeed been junked with the junk mail. So I went about trying to get some more. I went to the local library to ask how I may get some more. After all, we can pay our rates at the library, as it is a division of the council. However, there was no voting forms at the library and NOBODY at the library could tell me where to pick one up. They looked at the "information material" that was sent out with the voting papers and that didn’t tell them anything. I asked who in the council I could ring. The library staff didn’t know. They suggested that I go to the Post Shop. Weird, I thought, but I went there anyhow. They didn’t have any either so they suggested I ring up their handy phone with a bunch of Govt departments and ask someone. I rang someone in the council, nobody was available and so they told me to ring Chief Electoral Officer Ross Bly.

By then, I had to go back to work and thought "stuff it". If councils send their voting forms with the junk mail, have no option if they are junked, do not let us vote online, do not give us much information on who the people we are voting for, or what they will do for the city, or how we can get forms if they are not sent or lost, well there's not much I can do about that.

So I didn’t vote. And it wasn’t STV's fault. About 40 percent of people voted in Wellington. Last time it was 47%. Most people did not have a clue who they were voting for. If you didn’t want John Terris as mayor, you voted for "someone else". That someone else became mayor.

And we still don’t know who the Marlborough mayor is. Perhaps it will be that "someone else".

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

you're complaining.
I left Kerry Blank but she still got in.
I asked around for a man of integrity and was told jack Ruben has been saying the same thing for decades.

How many morons do we have in this city.
40% voted and she claims she has a mandate.
Thats like her OH so not anonymous benefactors oops sorry donators.

Thank God Ruben and Pepperel are in and 5 of old team are out.
Maybe she and her development buddies can be kept in check.

Swimming said...

Perhaps the reason Kerry got in was because people like you left her blank. If more people rated her the lowest there would have been less chance of her getting in. That’s the rules of STV.

Span said...

i'm 90% sure that's not the case - ranking someone bottom doesn't make them less likely to get in than if you left them blank. i'll check and come back. i'm in a party that has used STV internally for elections for years and i'm sure i remember having this conversation with the General Secretary that is basically an expert on this.

i think you also have to put a continuous series of rankings or your vote is invalid (ie you can't put someone 1, then someone else 10 and leave everyone else blank).

although ranking someone bottom does make you feel better of course.