Postal voting for local elections might be arcane and ridiculous but mooted alternatives are no silver bullet, writes Anna Rawhiti-Connell in The Bulletin.
Early voter turnout figures improve overnight
Yesterday, I decided to look into whether postal voting for local elections was still the go for today’s Bulletin. I went in open-minded. Has this defence been prompted by the discovery that my great uncle (secretary of the Department of Internal Affairs from 1968-1978) was partially responsible for enabling postal voting? No. Will I die on this hill? Probably not. Figures published yesterday by Toby Manhire had a lot of people concerned about low voter turnout. Manhire updated those figures later in the day and things have shifted from dismal to better than 2019 in Christchurch. Obvious caveat –it’s early days –but voter turnout for local elections has always been a bit rubbish when compared with turnout for general elections. The turnout gap between the general election in 1946 and local elections in 1947 was 56.5%.
Mode of voting conversations mask gnarlier issues
This doesn’t mean we should just accept that fact and keep putting paper into more paper and then into a dwindling number of boxes forever. But discussions about the mode of voting mask gnarlier issues like motivation, voting systems and how local government elections are run. Postal voting was used in the 60s and 70s and then adopted across the board for local elections in 1989. It was mooted as a way to address, wait for it, concerns about low voter turnout. In a 2019 very readable report on online voting, AUT political scientist Julienne Molineaux argues average voter turnout figures mask variances in elections. Things like an exciting race, or indeed a dull one.
Call for the return of polling days
We used to have polling days like we do with general elections and the Porirua and Hutt City mayors have called for a return to a set day to cast your local election votes. I will always be a fan of anything that gets us closer to Australia’s democracy sausage incentives but it would cost more to run elections that way. Covid measures and two referendums notwithstanding, the 2020 general election cost $160m to run. It would also very likely require the running of local government elections to be centralised, something the Justice Select Committee has recommended the government consider. As Toby Manhire writes, repeated inquiries have resolved that turnout, participation and representation in local elections would be enhanced if the Electoral Commission was running them but that’s off the table for now.
Why can’t we vote online?
Justin Hu has done a great job on Newsroom of wading through all the possible solutions offered up to counter low voter turnout and voter apathy. Based on what he’s found, there doesn’t seem to be a silver bullet to lifting voter turnout. That includes online voting, which is laden with security risks, cost and potential inequality. We actually have a handy summary of Molineaux’s 2019 report on online voting on The Spinoff. Hu also spoke to Molineaux who said the focus on online voting in 2016 and 2019 diverted resources from strategies to better engage with harder-to-reach communities. We have deployed a strategy of sorts to reach typically younger, perhaps less engaged voters on TikTok. His name is Josė Barbosa and he explains the foreign concept of paper and the practice of putting it in a box for us in this minute long video.