KEY POINTS:
Credit is due to Counties Manukau District Health Board for listing candidates in random order rather than alphabetically to try and ensure every aspiring board member gets an equal chance of being elected. But for bemused health board voters, and that goes for most of us in Manukau and elsewhere, what we really need is a free pin and blindfold as well.
By the time I'd got to number two choice in my Auckland Health Board vote, I was struggling to recognise names, let alone judge whether they would make good overseers of Auckland's biggest industrial enterprise.
All that Manukau Health Board has achieved by randomising candidates' names is ensure the field of largely unknowns are not being alphabetically discriminated against. The so-called "donkey vote" advantage, where candidates at the start or end of a list are more likely to be elected, is well known in Australia.
There, voters not only have to grade candidates in order of preference, as we have to do in health board elections, they also have to vote, fullstop. This forces electors to have a stab at picking a winner. For the lazy, or befuddled, the temptation is to tick the first few, or last few names on the ballot, giving these candidates a better chance of selection than those buried in the middle.
After the 2004 DHB elections, Otago Health Board chairman Richard Thompson compared the results of the five New Zealand health boards that listed candidates randomly, with the 16 that used alphabetical listing. The results were remarkable. "If your name was Atholl the Aardvark," he wrote, "you had more than twice as much chance of being elected in an alphabetical listing than poor old Rocky the Racoon".
The average chance of being elected was 29 per cent. But if your name started with "A" you had a 53 per cent chance of winning, compared with 21 per cent for a Thompson down the page in the "Q to T" group.
In the randomised polls, "A to D's" were 24 per cent successful, the "Q to T's" 29 per cent, with the overall average, 27 per cent.
Unfortunately, Mr Thompson's research highlights what an uninformed raffle the selection of health board members has become. Sadly, random listing does nothing to make the voter's choice more informed, it just evens up the odds of fluking a place on the board.
Talking of roosters, it's amazing how the political right-wing has got their feathers in such a flutter over the thought of a Falun Gong marching band in the annual Farmers Santa Parade down Queen St. In yesterday's letter to the Herald, Michael Barnett, chief executive of the Auckland Chamber of Commerce and chairman of the Santa Parade Trust, says "the basis of the refusal" to let Falan Gong join in is an incident in another city where the group handed out origami lotus blossoms which opened to scenes of torture in China. But that's history. Palmerston North officials confirm it did happen two or three years ago. But the group were told it was not in the spirit of Christmas and since then have participated in that Christmas parade without a problem.
Interesting-ly, in an email to Auckland City councillors on Saturday, Mr Barnett did not mention torture scenes. Instead he attacks their politics. "Like it or not they choose to use their role to attack a country that New Zealand has a relationship with and they do so by attacking the political party that is in power ... " Further, he complains that city councillor Cathey Casey "has tried to intimidate me and the Santa Parade which will not help us be better informed and on that basis I continue to deny this group participation". Political ally and retiring Citizens and Ratepayers leader Scott Milne chipped in with an email that concluded "tell the jelly spine PC peaceniks they have to listen to everybody but don't have to bow to every pushy minority".
To think I'd live to see two right-wing business leaders rushing to protect the sensibilities of an undemocratic communist regime. Talk about Bah Humbug!
