Hard News: The sole party of government
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Online voting would require verified paper ballot backups which people could check a) Their vote was recorded as who they voted for b) no extra votes or changed votes are on the system (recounts), and that all gets rather complicated and dangerous very quickly. I'm against it.
Here are the electorate turnouts (before the effect of specials). gold prize to Wairarapa, silver to Ōtaki, bronze to Dunedin South
1 Auckland Central 0.6147062
2 Bay of Plenty 0.7285598
3 Botany 0.6314051
4 Christchurch Central 0.6687067
5 Christchurch East 0.6747357
6 Clutha-Southland 0.7109519
7 Coromandel 0.7230737
8 Dunedin North 0.6999908
9 Dunedin South 0.7530902
10 East Coast 0.6941691
11 East Coast Bays 0.6723085
12 Epsom 0.6486282
13 Hamilton East 0.6766798
14 Hamilton West 0.6726180
15 Hauraki-Waikato 0.5206937
16 Helensville 0.7020235
17 Hunua 0.7189178
18 Hutt South 0.7270650
19 Ikaroa-Rāwhiti 0.5588218
20 Ilam 0.6917468
21 Invercargill 0.7055316
22 Kaikōura 0.7301939
23 Mana 0.7187318
24 Māngere 0.5646660
25 Manukau East 0.5676559
26 Manurewa 0.5683573
27 Maungakiekie 0.6389404
28 Mt Albert 0.6671641
29 Mt Roskill 0.6372756
30 Napier 0.7308530
31 Nelson 0.7274589
32 New Lynn 0.6528478
33 New Plymouth 0.7101089
34 North Shore 0.6876983
35 Northcote 0.6667752
36 Northland 0.7167634
37 Ōtaki 0.7551267
38 Pakuranga 0.6750634
39 Palmerston North 0.7157678
40 Papakura 0.6633582
41 Port Hills 0.7257290
42 Rangitata 0.7276606
43 Rangitīkei 0.7344235
44 Rimutaka 0.7200514
45 Rodney 0.7407089
46 Rongotai 0.7122716
47 Rotorua 0.7096158
48 Selwyn 0.7520363
49 Tāmaki 0.7029035
50 Tāmaki Makaurau 0.4922881
51 Taranaki-King Country 0.7240330
52 Taupō 0.7110777
53 Tauranga 0.7191759
54 Te Atatū 0.6558156
55 Te Tai Hauāuru 0.5452796
56 Te Tai Tokerau 0.5549410
57 Te Tai Tonga 0.5225408
58 Tukituki 0.7217799
59 Waikato 0.7101029
60 Waimakariri 0.7189314
61 Wairarapa 0.7759522
62 Waitaki 0.7431510
63 Wellington Central 0.6778748
64 West Coast-Tasman 0.7341532
65 Whanganui 0.7092760
66 Whangarei 0.7217878
67 Wigram 0.6660151 -
Craig Ranapia, in reply to
I think it also assumes that the reason people don’t vote is because they can’t be bothered to visit a polling booth
It's an assumption that begs the question why turnout at the last round of local body elections was twitching around 40% despite it hardly being onerous to have two weeks to take your papers out of the letterbox, fill 'em in and mail them back. IMO, making a fetish out of e-voting misses the point that if you're disconnected from politics and the political process the medium doesn't signify.
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One more,
23 Kelston 0.6173830It wasn't showing on the page I was data matching against last night but is there this morning. My guess is that someone missed it on the list of electorates to display as it is new. But all good now.
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Dismal Soyanz, in reply to
Wow.
What was the source for that, David?
Compared against 2011 for Wellington Central (85%) that's a massive drop!
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Stephen R, in reply to
Sure, someone could steal the code from your letterbox, in the same way they can steal your EasyVote card now. The proposed system is no less secure than the current one.
But if you nick someone's EasyVote, and they actually go down to vote, then you end up with two votes for that name, and the wheels of ... I was going to say justice, but shall we say "electoral law" start to roll.
I think that does make the current system slightly more secure than the proposed one.
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Dismal, I got the general roll numbers for each electorate from
http://www.elections.org.nz/research-statistics/enrolment-statistics-electorate?name=
and I had a script running through getting the vote count for each electorate linked off here
http://www.electionresults.govt.nz/electionresults_2014/electorateindex.html
and linked them together (I've also got the party vote for each electorate at the same time, but haven't had time to do anything with that yet).
All of that said, I did muck up the initial links for a couple in the U-W section (but not Wellington Central), and a full corrected list is
1 Auckland Central 0.6147062
2 Bay of Plenty 0.7285598
3 Botany 0.6314051
4 Christchurch Central 0.6687067
5 Christchurch East 0.6747357
6 Clutha-Southland 0.7109519
7 Coromandel 0.7230737
8 Dunedin North 0.6999908
9 Dunedin South 0.7530902
10 East Coast 0.6941691
11 East Coast Bays 0.6723085
12 Epsom 0.6486282
13 Hamilton East 0.6766798
14 Hamilton West 0.6726180
15 Hauraki-Waikato 0.5206937
16 Helensville 0.7020235
17 Hunua 0.7189178
18 Hutt South 0.7270650
19 Ikaroa-Rāwhiti 0.5588218
20 Ilam 0.6917468
21 Invercargill 0.7055316
22 Kaikōura 0.7301939
23 Kelston 0.6173830
24 Mana 0.7187318
25 Māngere 0.5646660
26 Manukau East 0.5676559
27 Manurewa 0.5683573
28 Maungakiekie 0.6389404
29 Mt Albert 0.6671641
30 Mt Roskill 0.6372756
31 Napier 0.7308530
32 Nelson 0.7274589
33 New Lynn 0.6528478
34 New Plymouth 0.7101089
35 North Shore 0.6876983
36 Northcote 0.6667752
37 Northland 0.7167634
38 Ōhāriu 0.7362756
39 Ōtaki 0.7551267
40 Pakuranga 0.6750634
41 Palmerston North 0.7157678
42 Papakura 0.6633582
43 Port Hills 0.7257290
44 Rangitata 0.7276606
45 Rangitīkei 0.7344235
46 Rimutaka 0.7200514
47 Rodney 0.7407089
48 Rongotai 0.7122716
49 Rotorua 0.7096158
50 Selwyn 0.7520363
51 Tāmaki 0.7029035
52 Tāmaki Makaurau 0.4922881
53 Taranaki-King Country 0.7240330
54 Taupō 0.7110777
55 Tauranga 0.7191759
56 Te Atatū 0.6558156
57 Te Tai Hauāuru 0.5452796
58 Te Tai Tokerau 0.5549410
59 Te Tai Tonga 0.5225408
60 Tukituki 0.7217799
61 Upper Harbour 0.6328193
62 Waiariki 0.5243417
63 Waikato 0.7048646
64 Waimakariri 0.7375239
65 Wairarapa 0.7345064
66 Waitaki 0.7431510
67 Wellington Central 0.6778748
68 West Coast-Tasman 0.7341532
69 Whanganui 0.7092760
70 Whangarei 0.7217878
71 Wigram 0.6660151I will try and get the code I used (in R) up and shared, but that will probably not happen for a few days.
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Alfie, in reply to
But if you nick someone's EasyVote, and they actually go down to vote, then you end up with two votes for that name, and the wheels of ... I was going to say justice, but shall we say "electoral law" start to roll.
I think that does make the current system slightly more secure than the proposed one.
Point taken. But using RealMe would get around that issue, wouldn't it?
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Lucy Telfar Barnard, in reply to
Election web site tells me here that there were 2405652 votes including specials yet to be counted. Your population estime for 2014 was 3378138. That’s 71.2%.
Cool, thanks Mike. I was thinking that was a big drop in turnout, and not only forgot I wasn’t yet comparing like with like, but also, when I’d earlier been thinking about it, assumed the specials would be fewer than that.
So maybe advance voting did make a difference to turnout? I’d hoped it would.
My file's at home, but I'll have another go at it later.
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Dismal Soyanz, in reply to
Cheers.
Something doesn’t quite gel here with 77% number in the summary page versus those you’ve got. Could the difference be specials?
Eta: I see that there are specials in there but is that the final final specials?
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David, that's really helpful for what I wanted to do next: compare turnout to weather on the day!
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izogi, in reply to
They’re not talking about electronic machines in voting booths.
Yep. I was responding to something Chris mentioned.
Horses also work perfectly well… we don’t need those stinkin’ automobiles. And as for those new-fangled computer thingies…
For general elections at least, where we’re still using secure voting environments and ballot boxes, do you know if there’s been any realistic attempt to address the social issues I raised, which are mostly a consequence of online voting not guaranteeing the privacy of a vote, and making it possible to produce evidence for someone else of how you’ve voted? Sure, electoral officials can presently trace ballot papers back to a person if they try hard, but those ballot papers are kept in a strictly controlled and secured system, and then destroyed.
That’s really my number one concern with shifting to online voting, or to postal voting for that matter, even though we’ve already gone down that road to an extent. It’s a significant part of the integrity of the electoral system that’s being sacrificed, yet so far everything I’ve seen in promotion of the online voting has ignored that it’s even an issue.
Maybe it’s still worth a compromise if there’s a likely benefit: we already compromise to small degrees to let people vote from overseas, or when they really can’t reach a polling booth. But as Craig also said, I think there’s plenty of reason to suspect that making online voting a major thing still wouldn’t make a jot of difference to turnout long-term if the fundamental problem is people’s engagement with politics… at least beyond the first one or two occasions when it’s new and trendy. There’s a risk we’d be throwing away that electoral integrity for no benefit.
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To the best of my knowledge, specials are yet to be included, so all this is provisional until the final results, and once I grab the previous elections results this evening with a slight modification of the script, we will need to be aware of not quite comparing like with like.
Average turnout in electorates won in 2014 by a National MP 0.703
Average turnout in electorates won in 2014 by a Labour MP 0.644 -
Gary Young, in reply to
But using RealMe would get around that issue, wouldn't it?
Is RealMe sophisticated enough to identify the actual person logged on and using the computer?
eg. What would prevent the dominant male in a household taking his wife and kids voting IDs and doing all the voting himself?
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Dismal Soyanz, in reply to
Average turnout in electorates won in 2014 by a National MP 0.703
Average turnout in electorates won in 2014 by a Labour MP 0.644That in itself tells a story. If higher turnout works against the right, then this really reinforces (not that it needs to) the disconnect between Labour and the electorate.
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Alfie, in reply to
Sure, electoral officials can presently trace ballot papers back to a person if they try hard, but those ballot papers are kept in a strictly controlled and secured system, and then destroyed.
I'm sure that a secure protocol could be implemented to guarantee anonymity. Mind you, the NSA/GCSB already have access to everything anyway, so big brother could record your voting preferences if he/she/it was so inclined.
Internet voting has been trialled in a few countries already.
Internet voting was first used for binding political elections in 2000 in the U.S. in a pilot across several states targeting overseas voters. Since then, 13 more countries have used Internet voting. Two use Internet voting nationwide (Estonia and the United Arab Emirates); five use Internet voting in some parts of the country or for certain members of the electorate (Australia, Canada, France, Mexico and Switzerland); two have ongoing pilots (India and Norway); three have piloted Internet voting and decided not to continue its use (Finland, the UK and the U.S.); and two adopted Internet voting, but decided to discontinue it (Netherlands and Spain).
The costs of administering elections would drop considerably -- that would also apply to referrenda, even if the government of the day chooses to ignore the wishes of the majority of its citizens.
I agree that there are certainly secrecy/privacy issues which need to be addressed. But anything which makes voting easier has to be worth considering.
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Emma Hart, in reply to
Is RealMe sophisticated enough to identify the actual person logged on and using the computer?
Absolutely not. RealMe even, by default, leaves your password typed in to that field so you just have to push "log in".
Now, go through the process of applying for RealMe, and assume you don't have a driver's licence or a passport.Then come back and tell me how much easier than enrolling to vote that was.
Abuse is, to me, the number one problem with on-line voting, and I haven't seen any advocates address it. The privacy of the polling booth is essential to a secret ballot, and electoral staff enforce it. The privacy of your own home is where people are the most vulnerable.
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Alfie, in reply to
Is RealMe sophisticated enough to identify the actual person logged on and using the computer?
eg. What would prevent the dominant male in a household taking his wife and kids voting IDs and doing all the voting himself?
Who's to say that your dominant male isn't already collecting the entire family's EasyVote cards and tripping around a few polling booths with his mates?
A determined person could theoretically game any electoral system, but unless there was mass-scale fraud which would surely attract public attention, their influence would be statistically insignificant.
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izogi, in reply to
I’m sure that a secure protocol could be implemented to guarantee anonymity
That’s not the security I have the problem with, though. At best, an online voting system mimics the security and privacy around storing of ballot papers, which was my point. But online voting doesn’t mimic the security and privacy of the polling booth, where there’s a controlled guarantee that nobody’s allowed to see how you vote, or any evidence of it, except for you.
Relying on people to keep their own voting environment secure isn’t the same, because not everyone has that kind of freedom and assertiveness over their peers and others around them.
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If internet voting is supposed to increase turnout by making voting more accessible, then let's review Sofie's comment here. Something tells me that telling people in the situation she describes they can now conveniently cast their vote online won't go down terribly well.
Also: What Gary Young says about the dominant male of the household and Emma says about abuse.
Those are also reasons to can postal voting and go back to good old fashioned ballot boxes for local polls.
And I still think no matter how secure you make it, online voting is too vulnerable to being hacked. NSA/GCSB or China or whoever or all of the above. The system we have works and is pretty damn secure, so stop trying to fix it.
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The problem I had with CGT was simply how it was going to be calculated. Say you inherit a house from your Grandfather, as it is a family asset the family had gained nothing and if that house were sold to buy, say, a larger house then the profit, if any, should be calculated as anything over and above market value taking into account the cost of the larger property adjusted for actual current value. This is the same, if not similar, to the way the Family home is regarded. If, however the inherited home is sold and the beneficiary pockets the proceeds is it regarded as "Profit"? and therefore taxed? I am not sure but I suspect that is the way voters saw it.
My point comes back to a simple question. Who should benefit from advances gained by our ancestors, our forefathers, our family?.
I would hold that the advances and improvements of previous society is the property of current society but the image we see is that of an elite exploiting those societal assets for the benefit of the few, not the true owners, society as a whole.
This is why a Universal wage is required. A great number of job in modern society are non productive admin jobs doing nothing but keeping the outdated Protestant Work Ethic driven society going. A true and fair sharing of a social wealth would allow people to actually enjoy life itself and not just survival and therefore competitive behavior and conflict.
So do we take a little from the distribution of family wealth? Well that depends where that family accrued that wealth and how.
Accidentally posted this unfinished so had to sum up rather fast.
Thoughts? -
As Chris points out we also now have to consider the NSA/GCSB.
I'm not sure I would feel comfortable voting online for a party that had promised to reign in the GCSB knowing that my online activity was being observed and recorded by said GCSB.
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The privacy of the polling booth is essential to a secret ballot, and electoral staff enforce it
Exactly.
Also, if the norm for voting is in-person at a polling booth, then it's close to mandatory privacy, which you can't opt out of.
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Emma Hart, in reply to
Who’s to say that your dominant male isn’t already collecting the entire family’s EasyVote cards and tripping around a few polling booths with his mates?
One of whom is convincingly dressed as his wife, right?
Your tone makes me assume that for you, abuse is something very abstract, something it's okay to play thought-experiment hypotheticals with. You've just described a far more complicated process, and one that would be observed by multiple people, AND require a conspiracy. That's not, by and large, how domestic abuse happens. Mostly, abusers don't abuse while other people are watching.
On Saturday, I had a guy moved away from standing over his wife while she voted. This isn't abstract. That woman is real, and your system would disenfranchise her and enable her abuser. But *handwave*, right?
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Rich of Observationz, in reply to
Who's to say that your dominant male isn't already collecting the entire family's EasyVote cards and tripping around a few polling booths with his mates?
Well, if you did that and the polling official or scrutineer (that's one reason they call the names out as you vote) recognised the gender or even age discrepancy, you'd wind up in trouble.
Personation has become quite unusual - I don't recall hearing of a case. Vote harvesting, unfortunately, is definitely a thing.
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Steve Barnes, in reply to
(I've also got the party vote for each electorate at the same time, but haven't had time to do anything with that yet).
That may prove to be very interesting, that is where I see a possible anomaly.
This is interesting, from Papakura. Nat party vote 15,705. COLLINS, Judith 14,001. 1704 Papakura National voters don't like Collins.
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