Basically – it depends.
*Why* did chief lose mana?
*What seniority did chief have? (There were rankings among ariki & rakatira, as there were female & male 'chiefs'-)
*A strong tribe would fight back one way…

I thought it turned when Crosby Textor came on the scene but also thought nobody else was disturbed. Now Key has given up on his teapot antics. From now on he is actusually…

So that made me nearly spill my coffee. LOL moment there. :))

Ms Chuang was charged with unlawfully accessing a computer system and later pleaded guilty. Judge Phil Gittos refused her bid to be discharged without conviction in the Auckland District Court and she was fined $1000 to be…

If I had a few hours, I'd analyse the numbers on that.…

That Chuang's father had an affair really does shoot down any suggestion that…

I’m quite interested in the impact in less material terms:

The mana of a chief was integrated with the strength of the tribe.…

And suddenly two more Johns – Slater and Palino – are struck down with John Banks selective memory syndrome.

Really, the whole political right in Auckland is a bunch of irredeemably frightful cads.

Chuang was was pressured into dishing on Brown by a member of Palino’s campaign team.

Slater also appears to have been fabricating his accounts of what she thought about Brown.

Next question. Ask Stephen Cook if he has been paid for the Len Brown story. And by whom. Freelancers…

It's not far off from the half-plus-seven rule of thumb (attributed to Hugh Hefner?).

Something I found to be kind of arty in the Herald’s account was:

She said a security guard once found her naked with Mr Brown in the Ngati Whatua room in the Town Hall…

I've been surprised at how so many people have banged on about the "age difference". She's 32, for goodness sake.

Otoh, I think it was pretty poor judgement to be doing it in…

Well, I really disagree with *that*, which is what the first part of my response was referring to.

And yes, Australian…

Well, far be it from me to hold the media to tiresome journalistic standards, but if there’s any actual evidence that Brown did anything illegal or unethical I’ve not stumbled over it. (Fun Fact: adultery isn’t a criminal offence in this…

That’s because it’s a two-party system, Rich. And note, as Paul Campbell implies, the elections on that ballot paper are all to fill a single vacancy. (The San Francisco and Oakland City Councils are elected by "three-choice" single-seat STV.)

The system is designed to ensure (or simply assumes) a Democrat or a Republican will win, but gives voters who support neither party the opportunity to vote for an independent / third party candidate.

It is another, lesser, version of STV, in my view, down there with, but just above, Australian Senate STV.

Granny is for all the readers who are without sin. Shocking!, sex! catholic!! . BURN in hell!! :)

Dexter: Perhaps we could keep this forum slightly above the level of the New Zealand Herald and avoid elevating allegation and innuendo to the level…

"The 415" is so LA ... and well we hate them ....

But do locals really choke out the whole four syllables every time? Or call it SFR? Or the 415?

I find it interesting that Herald readers think Len Brown should go, but…

Remember that in that ballot they're not trying to elect 11 councilors for one ward

Well, yes, it’s a problem with society that some people don’t…

Funnily enough the Herald's claiming this based on its poll of 57% of people saying he should stand down, despite this only being marginally higher than [[http://www.aucklandcouncil.govt.nz/EN/AboutCouncil/HowCouncilWorks/Elections/Documents/2013acelectionpreliminaryresults.pdf|the 54% of those…

As for timing, well, it seems calculated to cause the maximum possible chaos and damage. What an unspeakably vile piece of work Cameron Slater is, and I'm not…

Note they use three-choice STV (I think) rather than exhaustive STV.

Other countries do proportional representation voting in polling booths, you know.

It took me most of an hour, three or four web sites, the newspaper and the posted out booklet to vote the other week. There's no way most voters are going to go to the ballot box at their local school…

Just the same for the Dunne "affair", the Banks…

But the poll on Stuff says he should not resign! Now what?!

The issue Is not really about "her", or Slater.

It is interesting that a security guard at the Edge venue was fired for having sex on the job and Len has done precisely that.

Len Brown doesn't have my confidence -…

I suspect the same can now be said of Len Brown...

In my area she was fear-mongering about three story apartment blocks popping up next door under the unitary plan despite there already being three story apartment blocks in the next street over. She was also spreading FUD about the airport's…

Not that I've seen. She's really played down her own role in it, essentially claiming that she was a reluctant participant and tried several times to end it, but…

You can view the super-city as an attempt to pull the same trick in reverse, gluing vast swathes of National-voting countryside onto Auckland…

To do…

On the timing, can't helping wondering if, with her having failed to get elected, the calculus has been "In three years' time when it's time to campaign the mistress will have been forgotten, but if we can…

So much so that they devote the first five! pages of today's edition to this "scandal". I despair for the future of journalism in New Zealand.

Brian Rudman pretty much says all that is needed in a…

Well, you could observe that that waiting to unleash a ‘scandal’ until after a result you know you won’t win to try and nobble (and neutralise) the winning candidate is a…

Bernard Orsman, who Russell mentioned in the OP, certainly doesn't, and he's senior editorial staff. Orsman supports sprawl, loathes public transport, and is generally against everything for which Len Brown stands. He doesn't make any secret of…

That’s actually one of the easiest things to tackle. Separate lists of login tokens and votes cast, burned directly to write-once media by computers that don’t have read access to that media. Those disks can then be…

This would cover his "hole" life, No?

The problem is not this – it is candidates who know that if people knew what they really stood for they wouldn't have a shit show of getting elected, so they hide behind…

Yes, I agree. While some candidates may have left a considerable trail of political activism on the internet, most…

I'll grant that it's not a complete anonymity guarantee with existing votes, as Matthew pointed out. The…

In a polling place, it's illegal to watch somebody vote and the officials are there to stop this from happening.

That's the gold standard. We should be moving from postal voting to in person voting, not from postal to online. And…

I'm not sure how you can verify that at present. You also can't verify that one person hasn't voted multiple times.

Online voting would allow us to prevent the more trivial attempts at voter fraud. There's a…

"The present National government are unethical and incompetent."
Is that the kind of thing you mean? ;)

__ "I want to make Auckland a world-class city" => "I want to make Auckland an unregarded backwater"
"I want to make the neigbourhood safer and more pleasant" => "I want to make the…

I'd settle for "what are your policies?". Very rapidly discounted anyone that said little more than "I want to make Auckland a world-class city" in the little leaflet. Well, duh.

Pretty much. We get preliminary results before midnight on polling day, final results within a fortnight, and it's bullet-proof in terms of simplicity and verifiability. We don't have arcane, error-prone systems like in the US, with private companies champing at the bit…

Would this be legal, if done with due anonymity?

That's not guaranteed now. In fact, it's explicitly disallowed. Non-trivial to determine, and involves officials digging through the ballot boxes and comparing written records from voter roll books, but our voting is not completely, irrevocably anonymous.

That's the crux of it, and good enough reason not to ahead, even if all the other problems are solved.

We get reasonable turnouts in general elections. If we made registration more automatic, we'd get better turnouts,…

Which is much less of an issue (though not completely a…

I don't see why online voting…

Well, yes, and that'd be my worry. For one, there's all those stories of suspect voting machines in the US. Secondly, to take the bogeyman du jour as an example, China and the US have a…

I don't think so, because online opens up the possibility of systematic and thorough-going problems. We have to think…

And most of it courtesy of sprawl, if one looks at where the growth occurred (the outer edges, for those unfamiliar with Auckland's geography). This city just cannot keep on growing outward. John "Build a…

This. I actually do believe that e-voting can be done properly, even at the national level in a country like NZ with a superb reputation for running elections well. However, it would need to be resourced like our national…

Just over half of New Zealand’s population growth since the last census occurred in Auckland.

Also, although Christchurch’s population fell, the population of the surrounding region…

We can’t have online for local elections, because people will then want to use it for general elections, and in general elections the stakes are high enough that online’s serious flaws will…

off the point, but astonishing to non-experts like me, is that I just read an article (in the Guardian) by someone who had been…

I suspect ( in Auckland) many people didn’t vote because they considered it a foregone conclusion. A good number of people ( more than 20,000) voted for John Minto & Penny Bright ( perhaps an…

I'm not bothered by it as long as a candidate has a demonstrable stake in the area. I've lived in places before, yet spent a…

In a ballot box system, such a fraud would be much harder, as you'd have…

True, but that doesn’t mean many candidates adopted different labels to deliberately deceive voters and hide their otherwise unpalatable political affiliations. Stephen Berry is amongst the most egregious of these. A hard line libertarian who actively promotes…

In a city with multiple districts it's a bit much to expect people to only stand for the area in which they live, particularly since…

"Are you now, or have you ever been a member…

Because this fraud in a ballot-box election was discovered by online sleuthing?

I was referring to…

It seems strange to me…

Strong result for City Vision and centre-left

"The 2013 Auckland Council elections have seen a strong performance from City Vision and progressive teams across the Auckland isthmus", says Gwen Shaw, Campaign Co-ordinator for City Vision.

"On the Auckland Isthmus City Vision achieved the…

At the same time, the rightists on the outgoing council distinguished themselves for their complete failure to cohere around a platform, a leader or anything else. Of the leading members, Dick Quax is Act and too extreme; Christine…

What we really need is:
– mayors (or leaders) elected by councillors, as we choose the government and the leaders of remaining regional councils.
– council elections…

Ah, of course. I hadn't made that connection.

Oh of course he fucking did, and frankly the Herald needs to ixnay the concern-trolling about turn out at an election they didn't deign to take slightly more seriously than One Direction stalkers and what Ri-Ri…