Viewpoint – Getting the basics of democracy right

Nearly $100 million separates our cheapest and most expensive voting options for local body elections, 2028, and the order your name appears on a ballot paper could sometimes decide who wins. 

The Hibiscus and Bays Local Board recently worked through these issues and gave feedback to the Governing Body to shape how fair and accessible local elections really are. The Governing Body will then make the final call next month.

Postal or booth voting?

Online voting isn’t on the table yet. A handful of places use it well (like Estonia) but most countries, including New Zealand, don’t have a national digital ID system set up yet. Elsewhere online voting is limited to overseas voters or specific regions and not always run smoothly (France annulled results in two electorates after credential problems). 

So, for now, it’s postal versus booths, and postal isn’t perfect either. A court recently voided the Ōtara-Papatoetoe local board election after finding real weaknesses in how postal votes were handled.

We decided to continue backing postal voting at this point. Cost isn’t the deciding factor, though the gap is enormous (about $15.5 million for postal versus $26 to $97 million for booths, up to $112 million for a mix of both). What matters more, though, is that switching to booths now would shut out around 35,000 Aucklanders overseas or elsewhere in the country when voting happens, since there’s no way yet to transfer their votes electronically. Locking out that many eligible voters is undemocratic and not an acceptable trade-off. If the law changes to fix that, booth voting could become our preference.

Tick a box, or rank candidates?

Auckland uses First Past the Post (FPP) where you tick your preferred candidates and most votes wins. The alternative, Single Transferable Vote (STV), has you rank candidates and votes transfer between them in rounds until winners emerge with genuine majority support. We backed keeping FPP. Adding a more complex system would certainly not help the extremely low voter turn-out for local body elections (29 to 35 per cent voter turnout over recent years).

Name order on the ballot

We used to think alphabetical order was best. New research changed our minds- candidates lower down the alphabet, especially in bigger races, can lose votes purely because of where their name sits. We’re now supporting a single randomly shuffled order, printed the same in every voting pack, to remove that bias.

This is the quiet work to uphold the integrity of local elections, and being willing to change our mind on things like name order, when the evidence changed, is exactly what that looks like. With turnout at record lows (29 per cent in 2025), these issues matter more than ever.