Posts by izogi
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Thanks Graeme, interesting read. Paragraph 15 caught my attention:
One table is dealing with a very small polling place. Within the first half-hour I discover that seven votes had been miscounted in the official count as Sepuloni votes when there should have been three to Bennett, three to Tolleestrup (Green), and one to Bradford (Mana). This alone would reduce the margin to one vote. Scrutineers on both sides are naturally affected by this event but it proves to have been exceptional.
I took an implication from that that there may have been some malice/corruption during the original count on the part of those doing the counting, which is very disappointing if true. Aren't there meant to be party scrutineers during the counts to catch this sort of thing, or does that not always happen at the smaller polling places?
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Legal Beagle: Election '11: the special votes, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
No, Banks is an electorate MP and ACT have no list MPs, not having polled enough to get more than one.
You are indeed correct. Silly me forgetting about the threshold after all that.
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Legal Beagle: Election '11: the special votes, in reply to Ben Austin,
Surely we should be counting John Banks as a National Party MP, in terms of reliability right?
Only as long as he doesn’t get run over by a bus during the next three years, because in that case he morphs back into Don Brash as far as the system is concerned. Unless (maybe) the bus was provably being driven by Brash and was speeding uncontrollably through an indoor pedestrian shopping mall at the time.
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Legal Beagle: Election '11: the special votes, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
In the backend, there’s an (unpublished, but auditable) database of eligible voters, based on driving license, IRD and Internal Affairs records. That allows anyones eligibility to be determined instantly.
Without wanting to be too critical of the general idea, there may be some privacy issues to work out if it's to involve using the data collected by several different agencies like that for a different purpose than its primary intention.
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Hard News: Last Words, in reply to Russell Brown,
Instead, a badly flawed process may well see Carmel Sepuloni – one of a handful of MPs picked out as the face of the party for the opening broadcast – out of Parliament because her list place isn’t high enough. Others behind her, like Jordan Carter and Kate Sutton, have no show.
If it's acknowledged as a mistake within the party, I've wondered if we might still see a stack of senior Labour resignations within the first year after the election. Labour messed it up back during that phase before it pulled itself together somewhat, but it's still not necessarily too late to let in some of the newer talent. It may create some irritating by-elections.
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Hard News: The Solemnity of the Day, in reply to Sacha,
It would be great to see the Greens and Labour or Natonal and Act talking about how they would manage the economy together in an MMP government. Instead we get the pretence of FPP and the prospect of a government with no practical constraints.
In a leaders' debate context, I've been thinking it'd be really really interesting to see head-to-head debates between leaders of the smaller parties and the bigger parties. Debates with more than two people are often messy and confusing, and I'd like to just see more leaders' debates and more combinations of two people arguing points, including at least one chance for someone like Russel Norman or Metiria Turei or Don Brash go up debating against (or conversing with) John Key or Phil Goff or each other without interference. I can't imagine Key or Goff in particular would ever go for it, though, thanks to all the stuff about being seen on the same level as someone they'd rather was perceived as less. Instead we have the media umpires trying to decide how much air-time each leader deserves and whether they're allowed to argue with each other according to their FPP-based tiered positioning, positioning particular leaders in front of the public before they've even said anything.
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Hard News: The Solemnity of the Day, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
I'm certainly on it because I updated my address a few months after I shifted, and they did the usual confirmations through the post. I figured I should at least update the roll to avoid confusing any jury summons, and strictly speaking it's against the (New Zealand) law to not update it, but probably not very binding for people not in NZ.
I can't see any reason why overseas addresses wouldn't be published. The NZ electoral roll is a public record. According to this, post shops display the roll for their local area, and the FAQ states that the EEC is required to provide enrolment details (including full name, address and occupation but NOT date of birth) to interested political parties, candidates, and approved researchers, unless you've applied to be on the unpublished roll. So it shouldn't be hard for any party to get a list of overseas voters if they wanted to direct-mail them, assuming all those people have actually kept their details updated.
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Hard News: The Solemnity of the Day, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
but then, none of them have my email or address, so I wouldn’t expect to, and would be a bit miffed if they’d managed to get their hands on them.
I thought the Green Party took my aussie postal address from the electoral roll. I can't think how else they'd have gotten it, but there are probably easily enough kiwis in Australia that it makes sense to bulk-mail domestically. I know the Greens traditionally gain the most, but I'm still surprised nobody else even tried, at least in my direction.
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Hard News: The Solemnity of the Day, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
C'mon, though, they're pretty much giving you all the options they can.
Yes and like I mentioned I think it was easy by comparison. There's only so much that can be done for people overseas. I just miss being able to drop into a nearby polling booth. It's my first time stuck outside NZ during an election and it feels isolated over here.
I feel miffed that the Green Party was the only one that tried to chase me for a vote. Did anyone else overseas hear anything direct from any other parties? :P
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Hard News: The Solemnity of the Day, in reply to Jeremy Andrew,
So she is up to date then...
Yeah, but somehow she doesn't feel the same ethical obligation as myself to rank the alternatives.