Posts by izogi
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Hard News: Where are all the polls at?, in reply to linger,
linger:
you can register at the same time as casting an advance vote (though not on the final polling day)
Does anyone know much about what Labour is talking about here?
The Labour Party is concerned voters who aren't enrolled are being turned away from advance voting booths.
I'd not been aware that advance voting stations doubled as enrolment stations. Is it meant to be all of them?
The article is also quite vague on detail and lacking conviction about how serious it is or isn't considered to be, but Labour seems to be saying that some unenrolled voters are being turned away from advance voting booths.
The General Secretary for the Labour Party, Andrew Kirton, is concerned the mistakes will affect Labour disproportionately.
More importantly, though, people shouldn't be denied the opportunity to vote when they're legally entitled to do so, irrespective of what impact it might or mightn't have on the Labour party, or any other party.
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Hard News: Where are all the polls at?, in reply to Ben Austin,
If that's the case then I'm most likely wrong. Ah well.
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Hard News: Metiria's Problem, in reply to Carol Stewart,
It must be a significant risk that voters won't like that, though.
All those likely Labour voters could elect a Green candidate if they chose to do so anyway, so they'll not necessarily be happy if Labour forced them to do that when they'd already decided they didn't want to.
Probably a few people in Labour would be happy to see the back of the Greens, even if it meant losing this election. Their presence has really complicated Labour's identity and campaigning for a long time, even if it's arguably been Labour's fault.
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Hard News: Where are all the polls at?, in reply to Trevor Nicholls,
If you're somebody who is concerned about how the country has been coping with those three issues, why vote for more of the same?
I can't look into people's heads and there could be a million individual reasons, but my simplistic guess would be that just because someone might think there's a problem somewhere doesn't necessarily mean they might think a change of government wouldn't make things worse than the status quo. Or perhaps they don't think that National's been a stagnant do-nothing government in the same way that some others do, and they perceive solutions to those problems will be here soon.
Not everyone votes for National when they prioritise good economic management, either. Possibly not everyone thinks National make good and competent economic managers.
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Hard News: Where are all the polls at?, in reply to Trevor Nicholls,
So we learned on tonight's news that yesterday's poll showed that the 3 most important priorities for the sampled voters were: health, education and the environment. All issues that you would think favour the left. Very strange that this same poll gave National 47% of their support, wouldn't you think?
This result? http://www.newshub.co.nz/home/election/2017/09/newshub-poll-new-zealand-s-top-election-concerns.html
It says they asked people to rank important issues, but it's not clear (to me) how those rankings were converted to percentages... which add to exactly 100% (including 2% don't know).
Whatever the method behind the numbers, I'm not convinced it's out of place. Is it so unreasonable to think that some people who identify with voting National might also introspectively consider the environment or health or housing to be really important to them? Maybe those are just the concerns everyone's thinking about, but some might just be more inclined to believe National's narrative about how best to approach them over the alternatives.
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Hard News: Where are all the polls at?, in reply to Gavin White,
The only time you see legitimate electorate polls these days is in seats like Ohariu, which (until recently) could affect the nationwide result.
I'm probably very wrong about this and there are no polls since before Dunne withdrew, but from what I'm seeing in Ohariu I'm getting a vague sense that Jessica Hammond Doube could make a good show towards winning it for TOP. That would be a significant upset nationally if it happened.
But I think Greg O'Connor went into it with the expectation of cruising through as being the obvious candidate for getting rid of Dunne in an environment wanting change. Suddenly that's turned on its head and he's having to compete with his vote being split by a newly-injected Green candidate on one side who collected 2700 electorate votes last time simply by being there for the Party vote, and a very charismatic TOP candidate on the other side who's now accused him of trying to convince her to withdraw so he can win. I watched him at a candidate meeting last night and just seemed out of sorts for much of the time, like he never prepared for such diverse competition.
Probably either he or Hudson will win it, but there might be enough people around Ohariu who are fed up enough with Hudson's sudden change of attitude in trying to win (thinking he's done very little for them as their local Nat list MP until now anyway), and not really liking O'Connor anyway, that they'd seriously consider electing someone else. Really she only needs to pull 1/3 of what would have been O'Connor's support and 1/3 of what would have been Hudson's support, and she has a chance.
Anyway, I'm just throwing that out there. :)
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Up Front: The Surprisingly Sincere Up…, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
This is really a thing?
I can't immediately find the refs but it definitely was in 2014. At least one NZ celebrity was publicly slapped for posting a photo, and countless others were also photographing their ballot papers and posting them to social media. Usually with good intentions, of course, for things like encouraging friends to get to the ballot box, but still....
I don't care if people tell each other how they've voted. What matters for me is that nobody can prove how they've voted. As soon as it becomes possible to bring away evidence of a vote, it becomes possible to compel someone to produce that evidence. That opens up a big can of worms in election integrity because it means someone's vote can be influenced by how they think they might be treated afterwards because of it. (Friends, partners, family, employers, etc.) I think it'd be a useful amendment to the Electoral Act to make it clearly illegal.
This is probably one of the most significant issues with online voting, imho, but it's an issue that's largely ignored in discussions about online voting.
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Can anyone with the legal knowledge comment on the rules around photographing one's marked ballot paper and posting it to social media?
To me it seems one of the things that should be made clearly illegal under the Electoral Act, because the ability for people to create evidence of how they're voting arguably compromises the integrity of the election. But I cannot see anything clearly indicated in the Electoral Act about this.
Last election there were lots of people sharing photos of their ballot papers, and being told off and sometimes threatened with prosecution. From memory, though, it seemed to come down to some kind of obscure technicality to do with counterfeiting ballot papers under 201(1)(a), even though it's almost certainly not what that offence was intended for and there must be a strong argument that a photograph of a marked ballot paper really isn't a forgery.
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However it happened it seems an odd type of thing for National to intentionally leak, if they were thinking about it.
A narrative of Winston over-claiming some super then paying it back doesn't seem ethically worse than Bill over-claiming a housing allowance then paying it back.... unless there were some presumption that Winston's more vulnerable to voters getting mad at him than Bill... although the housing thing was already out in the open and he's already the status quo, so maybe has a lesser effect by now.
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