‘We need to understand why people don’t vote’

Once again the turnout for local elections in some parts of the country is disappointing. Once again, pundits – including, this time, the prime minister – are suggesting the problem could be fixed if we adopted online voting.

My research suggests they are wrong, and here’s why – and what we need to do instead.

It is important to separate the convenience of existing voters from the desire to add new people to the voter pool.

Online voting would undoubtedly be popular among people who are already strongly motivated to vote, and who have good levels of digital literacy.

But that focuses on the convenience of existing voters, not increasing turnout. surveyed they offer 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.

Recent research into why young people don’t vote found a lack of information was the key reason. Local government election ballots are complex.

Who are all these people? What do they stand for? What difference will it make to my community if candidate A is 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 is online voting unlikely to solve local government’s deep turnout problems, it has risks. Experts in internet security and the design of software systems say it is impossible to design online voting in a way that prevents the hacking or manipulation of results.

Even the suggestion of interference, without proof, would undermine confidence in the result and further switch off potential voters.

Instead of reaching for a technological solution we need to take a hard look at local government in New Zealand.

There are no quick or easy fixes, but there are things that can be done:

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.

I support calls to have civics education as a requirement in schools, partnered with a lowered voting age of 16. Getting young people on the roll while they are at school, will be important in encouraging the voters of tomorrow.

Dr Julienne Molineaux is a researcher at The Policy Observatory, based at the Auckland University of Technology.