Online voting not the solution . . .

A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.

Opinion

As fretting continues over a trend of declining voter turnout for local body elections — although thankfully this district’s is at least holding steady around 48 percent — there is a temptation to reach for a silver bullet. For many, that is seen as a move to online voting.

An opinion piece in the Sunday Star-Times by Dr Julienne Molineaux, a researcher at The Policy Observatory based at the Auckland University of Technology, should give those promoting such a “solution” pause for thought and promote much greater consideration of other solutions.

When non-voters were surveyed they offered a variety of reasons: from apathy (“I don’t care about politics”) and cynicism (“It doesn’t matter who gets in, they’re all the same”), through to low levels of awareness of the elections. Some wanted to vote, but struggled with the task, wrote Dr Molineaux.

Recent research into why young people didn’t vote found a lack of information was the key reason.

Local government election ballots were complex. Who were all these candidates and what did they stand for? What difference would it make for my community if candidate A was elected instead of candidate B?

“Transferring a complex ballot from paper to a screen does nothing to make the real work — the decision-making — easier.”

Not only was online voting unlikely to solve deep turnout problems for local body elections, it came with security risks — and even the suggestion of hacking or manipulation of results would undermine confidence in the result and further switch off potential voters.

So, with no quick or easy fixes, these are the areas that Dr Molyneaux says should be the focus:

Hand the management and promotion of local government elections over to the Electoral Commission to run nationwide Get Out The Vote campaigns, creating a sense of occasion and providing basic information about what local government does and why it is important.Simplify the process by having only one voting system (FPP or STV) on each ballot. We should also question the value of District Health Board elections, when the elected members answer to central government, not voters.Make civics education a requirement in schools, partnered with a lower voting age of 16. Getting young people on the roll while they are at school would be important in encouraging the voters of tomorrow.