NZ Post apologises for election blunder

New Zealand Post has taken full responsibility and apologised for the delay in the processing of some votes in last year's local authority elections.

The state-owned enterprise yesterday appeared before the justice and electoral select committee, which is holding an inquiry into the elections after lengthy delays in processing some of the results.

Datamail, a wholly owned subsidiary of NZ Post, was contracted to process single transferable vote ballots for seven councils and 18 district health boards.

Yesterday, New Zealand Post chief executive John Allen said Datamail's performance was not up to the standard expected.

NZ Post accepted responsibility for the error and said the problem was "sorted" but there was no guarantee it would not happen again.

"Unfortunately an error occurred in the scanning and transformation process at Datamail," Mr Allen said. "Put simply ... the experts are attributing the problem to something called a 'contention'."

He admitted he did not know what a contention was but it was dealt with quickly once it was identified.

A contention problem is defined as being "an interruption to processing which was not detected either through normal error handling routines or other process controls".

NZ Post commissioned an independent report from KPMG to analyse Datamail's involvement in the processing of the STV results.

The report was highly critical, saying Datamail management had not fully appreciated the complexity and risks of the project and the project management was inadequate in a number of areas.

Mr Allen said work had since been done at Datamail to strengthen its risk and project management processes and address the issues raised in the KPMG report.

Act MP Stephen Franks accused Datamail of compromising accuracy for speed and questioned why it was so important to get the results on election night. "Most of us have posted the voting form three or four weeks before and we actually don't care," he said.

"I think there is a bit of vanity [among politicians] there."

Labour MP Lianne Dalziel said she had difficulty with the problem being put down to a "contention" and simply wanted to know what caused the trouble.

Mr Allen was forced to admit that the cause was never identified.

Last year's elections were the first time the STV system - in which voters rank candidates numerically -was used.

Papers are eliminated from the count if voters make mistakes such as omitting to write the number one against any candidate or selecting candidates with ticks, as they would in a first-past-the-post poll.

Delayed democracy

* Results in last year's local government elections were held up after a processing blunder in the single transferable voting system.

* Processing problems with private election contractor Electionz.com and its subcontractor, New Zealand Post subsidiary Datamail, discovered two days after the October 9 poll closed, caused the delays.