Here, the standard has always been that you show up, grab your ballot, and cast your vote in a matter of minutes. Lining up for five minutes would be a surprise.
Not this election. There was chaos in many electorates.
Polling workers have told me that they didn’t have the ballot papers they needed. Friends have told me of polling places where there were simply not enough workers who could issue ballots. Others struggled with workers who didn’t know how to register them or help them cast special votes.
People complain that they showed up at a voting place they had seen earlier only to learn that it was an advance voting place only, and the nearest election day polling place was a 15-minute walk away.
I even found my name had disappeared from the roll, despite voting in Tāmaki Makaurau for over 20 years. So, I had to spend an extra 10 minutes casting a special vote.
Then, the fancy new computer system collapsed. That’s simply unacceptable. That was a system with one job to do and one day it had to perform. A computer system like that needs to be stress-tested every possible way and it must be rock solid.
Polling staff – understaffed because the computer was meant to be labour-saving - were left to try to use the paper rolls they hadn’t been properly trained in to mark off voters.
The result of all of this was people having to queue for as much as an hour and a half to vote. How many gave up, confronted with such queues?
Heaps of people work on Saturday. How many would have thought they could pop down to vote in their lunch break like normal – only to have to leave when their break time ran out?
Who knows what a mess the official count that’s happening now is as a result of the mix of computer and manual rolls, along with staff untrained in registering voters and casting special votes.
This chaos wouldn’t have affected the overall election result – but how many electorates are going to be decided by a few dozen or a few hundred votes, which could be influenced by the election day disaster?
Every vote matters. Every Kiwi has the right to have their voice heard and their vote counted. That hasn’t happened this election, and that’s a disgrace.
And you and I both know it’ll be the poor, immigrants, Māori, and Pasifika who are most likely to not have got to vote as a result of the delays and queues – most of which were reported in heavily populated urban areas, like South Auckland and the CBDs of big cities.
After every general election, there’s a review undertaken by a parliamentary select committee. It’s usually pretty pro forma. I think this time the MPs in charge will have to really put the Electoral Commission’s feet to the fire and get proper explanations of what went wrong and how a repeat will be avoided in future elections. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are resignations as a result.
What it looks like to me, from what we saw on election day, is that the election was simply underfunded. The computer system looks like a botched attempt at cost-cutting: a faster way to look up and record voters than manual rolls as a way of cutting back on staff numbers. When it turned out the computer system didn’t really save that much time and, then, when it failed completely, there just weren’t enough workers to do the job the manual way.
There also seems to have been a cutback in the number of polling places in some electorates. Māngere had 46 election-day voting places in 2020. This election day, only 38.
We can’t penny-pinch on democracy. The budget for running the election is just over $20 per person. After the stuff-ups this time, Parliament will need to consider whether that is enough to ensure a fair chance to vote for everyone.
Shane Te Pou (Ngāi Tūhoe) is a commentator, blogger and former Labour party activist.
