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Mike Hosking: If they can't count the votes properly, why vote at all?

Author
Mike Hosking,
Publish Date
Tue, 5 Nov 2019, 4:07PM
(Photo / File)

Mike Hosking: If they can't count the votes properly, why vote at all?

Author
Mike Hosking,
Publish Date
Tue, 5 Nov 2019, 4:07PM

When a system doesn’t work, why don’t they fix it?

As we mentioned yesterday there seem an unduly large number of ties in this past local body election. Forget that the turnout is abysmal, as that sadly seems a problem beyond our fixing.

In Australia, where enrolment and voting is compulsory, during the same sex marriage plebiscite, there was a surge of people enrolling, but once they  had their say on the plebiscite, those numbers never translated into votes in the state election.

And the irony of that was that they knew they were enrolled , they knew they had to vote, and yet they didn’t and because they didn’t, fines are sent out. 200 000 of them in Victoria alone.

Now what does that tell you about democracy? Not only don’t people want to vote, they are prepared to be fined as well such is their disinterest.

Back to New Zealand. One draw has been broken with the toss of a coin. One with a name pulled out of a hat. Is it just me or does that make the whole process farcical? You either take this seriously or you don’t.

And that’s before we get to the even more serious part, and we are seeing it played out in Wellington in the mayoral race: what about the recount.

In the hat case a judicial review found in the recount the number changed and we didn’t have a draw at all, but a winner. In the Wellington case, the numbers have change alarmingly and rapidly

In the hat case, the deeply disturbing thing was that there weren’t that many votes involved to start with, so the simple question is, if you can’t count a few hundred votes accurately, what’s the point? And how do you deal with that? Is that fraudulent or just mere incompetence?

In the Wellington case, which obviously is a big city with a mayoral race to boot, but even so, is it getting acceptable for them to get the number wrong? And if you decide it isn’t, which I assume we have, why then are we pulling names out of hats or tossing coins? Why aren’t we automatically recounting?

The answer of course is cost, especially in a major mayoral race. And what if Foster gets tipped up and Lester restored, or what if Lester still loses but loses by a different number to the number he lost with in the first place? How many times do you count to be sure you have actually done what you were supposed to do in the first time round?

You’d think electronics are the answer, and yet using tech to vote seems further away than ever, now that we freak out about Facebook and the Russians. So when you vote, do you assume it counts, do you know it counts, and if the answer is in some cases no, you wonder why turn out is the way it is.

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