Voting in the latest Wanganui District Council referendum is set to create a new benchmark with the return of voting papers running well ahead of previous referenda. By midday yesterday 15,266 voting papers had been returned and that represents more than 48.9 per cent of papers sent out to the district's 31,200 eligible voters.
Noeline Moosman, the council's electoral officer, said the returns showed the referendum was tracking well ahead of the previous three.
"We're not counting as we go. We're only capturing the papers at this stage and start the official count after 5pm on May 21," Mrs Moosman said.
The accelerated response could be attributed to the inclusion of a sixth - and contentious - question asking voter if voters wanted an "h" added to the district's name of Wanganui.
It is the second time this question has been part of the council's referenda.
Initially Referendum 09 included five questions but this sixth was added after the New Zealand Geographic Board decided to publicly consult on changing the name to Whanganui.
An extraordinary council meeting on April 6 saw the councillors vote 9-4 in favour of including a question in the referendum about whether residents prefer the city to be spelled Wanganui or Whanganui.
That decision delayed the delivery of referendum papers by over a week.
Referendum 09 is part of the consultation process for the council's draft 10 Year Plan.
The five original referendum questions were on one paper and the Wanganui/Whanganui question on another, while the referendum information is in the form of the summary document of the draft 10 Year Plan.
The five original questions include: the sale of Energy Direct; the sale of council-owned pensioner housing; a levy for promotion of Wanganui; the relocation of the visitor information centre; and what level of rates residents prefer from low (2-3 per cent), medium (4-5 per cent) and high (7-8 per cent) or if they want councillors to decide.
Record response to referendum and there's still a week to go
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