Voters survive shame game
The endless hand-wringing and soulsearching over reasons for the low turnout in our local body elections are finally over. For days, weeks and months, the indifference of the much-maligned electorate, constantly castigated for their apparent apathy over not bothering to enrol to vote, had been the hot topic du jour.
It was a Game of Shame, a Top Town competition in reverse, in a race to the bottom as voter enrolment numbers revealed disgraceful voter disengagement.
It was as if the entire country had been unwittingly involved in some sort of grand psychological experiment in how to make a population feel franchise guilt. Vote-shaming was rife in the wider community, reaching such a fever pitch that even those who had voted, and voted early, were reporting feelings of deep shame about not voting.
And then, when voting day finally rolled round
. . . ta da, ladies and gents we had a winner . . . and it was you, with an increase in voter turnout, a whopping 2 per cent more than in the 2016 elections. Wow, 2 per cent, give that electorate a bloody medal!
It’s impossible to know if the small increase could be put down to the GTE (Guilt Trip Effect) but, as the Americans say, do the math. Guilt plus noise equals last-minute day-of-voting rush.
Impassioned voters had slackly slipped their voting envelopes under closed library doors hoping their last-minute box ticking would make a difference.
Photos that had appeared on social media of long snake-lines of voters queueing up on the last day of polling were seen as evidence that franchise had suddenly become fashionable, and that the electorate was panic-buying the voting message.
Then it appeared that in Wellington, the shadow, deep state mayor, Sir Peter Jackson, had brought about a shock result and that his plant, Andy Foster, was hovering to beat incumbent Justin Lester.
Voters hitherto unfamiliar with the term ‘‘beating the incumbent’’ thought it was a phrase they’d heard on a reality cooking show, or had seen acted out on a porn site devoted to onanism.
Meanwhile, small city slickers in Invercargill, emboldened by their passionate slogan ‘‘It’s all right here’’, voted their incumbent leader Tim Shadbolt in for his 11th time as a mayor.
Shadbolt, who turned in a campaign as lazy and low-key as his 2013 performance on Dancing With The Stars, said the campaign had been ‘‘intense’’.
In Auckland, where the two main candidates, Phil Goff and John Tamihere, hated each other energetically, the City of Sails voted the old grey mayor in. (Tamihere maintained that if Goff was placed in front of a grey wall, he would disappear.)
Goff effectively became the nation’s deputy leader, as the position of Auckland mayor is No 2 in the country, while an embittered and tearful Tamihere put his significant loss down to his ethnicity and ‘‘the commentariat hating the brown boy’s guts’’.
Overall, the rural turnout was better than in the big smoke, where city citizens appear to find local body elections so second-tier. There’s a certain snobbery about being seen to get excited about local body elections, how often the rubbish is collected, and how big your city’s Christmas tree will be this year.
Speaking of litter, there are some would-be voters who want electoral process made even easier. Short of turning up on the doorstop, putting pens in their hands, and carrying them in litters to a post box, what more can be done for electorate ennui? Perhaps legal inducements should be considered. What about $50 off the next power bill for every voting household in the kingdom?