An identity crisis resolved
The good people of Linkwater are entitled to feel semi-scandalised.
On the same day the Ma¯ ori party was being cast into electoral oblivion by the rest of the country, it was doing swimmingly at this rural Marlborough polling booth, claiming 123 of the 215 votes cast. Nobody was more confounded than the locals whose suspicions have now been validated. A recount has confirmed those 123 votes on election night were, indeed, National’s.
The mistake was equal-parts surprising and not. Counting and communicating results such as these are entirely straightforward tasks, but any system that has a human component simultaneously allows for human judgment (generally a good thing) and human error (not so much).
In this case the mistake wasn’t a person or persons miscounting 123 times, or frowned-upon results secretively being discarded. It was a data-entry gaffe picked up by the regular process of later recounting each polling booth’s returns. A case of routine checks serving their purpose. That’s not to deny the system has sometimes underperformed.
It is all-but inevitable that online voting will come into place during most of our lifetimes, bringing with it a different series of efficiencies and concerns. But in the meantime the system we have, however finite its prospects, has at worst been guilty of spasms of un-impressiveness rather than failures that assail the legitimacy of the process.
Another aspect of the very human nature of our present system would continue to apply even if electronic recording is embraced. And that’s the up-close-and-personal nature of postelection inquiry that can happen in rural electorates. Consider Scott’s Gap, Southland. Around the time one B. English was making his first and spectacularly successful bid for the safe National seat of Wallace (later expanded to become part of Clutha-Southland), this community attracted public attention on the basis that its polling booth showed somebody just the one, mind you - had voted Labour.
At such times the right to vote anonymously can come up against a good deal of community curiosity. The result was a medialed inquiry in which the laconic locals had to assure the rest of the country that there would be no witchhunts. If anything their greater concern was that all this scrutiny should not imperil their polling-booth status, which provided welcome income for the local hall.
Some of them assured reporters they had a pretty good idea who the straying voter might be but were willing to let it go on the basis that every community had its eccentrics.