A Tahunanui man has been told the only way he can vote in this year’s local body election is to break the law.
Daryl, who’s surname we’ve chosen not publish, leaves for a holiday in Turkey next week and won’t return until after the local body elections in mid-October. He says he’s been in touch with the electoral officer about the situation and asked if he could vote online, an option given to those voting overseas in the general election. But he was told that option doesn’t exist for council elections and he couldn’t vote at the New Zealand consulate in Istanbul either.
Posting letters to Turkey can be “dodgy” says Daryl and he wouldn’t trust it to arrive in time for him to cast his vote and get it back to New Zealand before the cut off.
The gap caused by not having an electronic option left around a dozen Nelsonians with similar problems at the last council election and more are expected to be affected this year. Daryl says one “informal” option was given to him by the electoral office: allow someone else to open his mail and cast the vote for him. The problem with that is that it breaks the electoral act, meaning it is against the law.
Warwick Lampp, the chief returning officer for Electionz which runs the election on behalf of Nelson City Council, says he would never recommend someone to break the law but if the voting packs are sent back correctly filled in then they are none the wiser and the vote is counted. “Most people use common sense with that, but it is illegal and it is an issue.”
Warwick says he fully supports the government changing the rules so electronic votes are eligible in local body elections, like they are in most other elections.
“Yes, absolutely. We do 120 elections a year and if you take out the council elections there’s probably about 100 that have an online component so it’s becoming second nature.”
Daryl says he was shocked when he discovered the only way he could cast his vote was to break the law and says it’s about time the government closed the gaping hole created by the act.
Warwick says that although the act is strict, it is open for change and it wouldn’t take much for an electronic option to be added. “The silly thing is that the act currently allows it, but the regulations to back it up haven’t been written to provide it. In the act it says you can vote electronically but the regulations make no mention of it. So they need to be written to allow online voting, which should be pretty straight forward.”
He says the minister of local government recently said he would instruct the department of internal affairs to write the regulations and Warwick is hopeful the issue will be solved by the next election.
“At the last election we had about 30 phone calls on this issue from around New Zealand, with about a dozen from Nelson. Just this morning I had a call from the North Island where there is a group of 20 people going on a tour group who leave the day before voting opens and are coming back the day after voting closes. So it sometimes happens. There will be many other cases where people make their own arrangements and we never know about it.”
