Businessman Tenby Powell is the new Mayor of Tauranga. In a stunning upset, the businessman has been elected mayor of the city where he grew up, despite having only moved back from Auckland in May.

Tim Shadbolt is back as Mayor of Invercargill. He tried his best not to be elected. He really did. He went on holiday for the last week of campaigning and faffed about beforehand. But proof that when it comes to local body elections, it's pretty much always the devil you know. The other factor is that opponents who come rampaging in claiming to be able to freeze rates and reduce spending are on the whole given short shrift.

The optimist in me thinks that people are beginning to recognise that the problem with many of our cities and towns has come from skinflints and visionless people who have won favour on low rates while the infrastructure around us everyday crumbles from lack of investment.

And this is the major weakness of local body politics, in that so many people seem unable to realise the job our local authorities do for us and how important they are. All our water, all our excrement, all our rubbish, all the stuff that actually keeps us alive. Then there's all our local roads, all the lights on those roads, all our parks and footpaths.

Sometimes I actually wonder what national government does and why it garners so much more attention that the people who actually keep us alive.

But it does and the common refrain throughout this local body elections has been the lack of voter turnout.

A lot of people have suggested that we go online. That the new world can't be bothered filling out a paper vote and popping it in the mail. They want it all online and through apps because its so much easier. Make it easier and people will vote more.

This is irrelevant. My voting papers came to me with an app that showed me all the information on all the campaigners written by themselves. It was called a booklet.

I cast my vote by ticking a box, on paper. I posted it one morning on the way to work. It took about 5 minutes out of my day.

For online voting, you need to trust the people behind the technology, it's not the council, it will be outsourced to a provider. You need to be sure it's not hackable. You have to make sure that people who don't have computers or broadband or smartphones can still vote. Yes, there are still people like that. They're called poor. And a move to online only could disenfranchise them and if there's one word you don't want to hear in democracy it's disenfranchisement.

And there's two big things about online voting. First you need to register and then you need to download the app and you will only do that if you give a stuff in the first place.

Which brings me back to the beginning. Too many New Zealanders don't care about their cities and towns and processes of electing the people that run them and yet every day their decisions impact your life. From the toilet to the train to the very water you drink.

Forget online voting. Our biggest challenge is to get people to give a damn.