Posts by izogi
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Hard News: Art with a job to do, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
Yes, it does. (Everybody wins because eventually they all voted for the winner!)
I was really just considering the theoretical possibility that people who voted for Lockwood/Red might all utterly hate Lockwood/Black, for some reason. Which is contrary to what I thought Matthew Hooton was stating. Assuming why people vote as they do without actually knowing is a risky thing, and just because people like one fern rendition doesn't mean they like any others.
The counting system means that if the next-preference alternatives can't survive long enough on their early preferences, then those alternatives are wiped out before the massive number of Lockwood/Red voters' votes can transfer to them. So Lockwood/Black might have won by combining second-third-forth preferences of the alternatives, but theoretically another of the alternatives might have overtaken it if second prefs of Lockwood/Red had been attributed to its first prefs.
But that's the counting system we've decided on. None's going to be perfect, and it's still much better than FPP.
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Hard News: Art with a job to do, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
From the count it did seem the black-flag vote seemed to be initially split, eventually converging on the Lockwood-with-black preference over the Lockwood-with-red preference. Especially when the Black and White Silver Fern was eliminated, those went overwhelmingly to the eventual winning option which seems to be what nudged it in front.
But yeah. From the provided info there’s no way to tell where all of the Red/White/Blue votes would have gone if it were eliminated earlier, or the Black/White/Blue votes for that matter. For all we know, every one of the Lockwood Red/White/Blue voters might theoretically all have next-preferred Red Peak (ooooh lotsa Red!) over the other Lockwood design (oooh giant Fern), even though those votes were never going to transfer over under the counting system, with RP already having been eliminated. It seems unlikely, though. :)
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Hard News: Art with a job to do, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
I wouldn't know about legality of the EC to analyse, but if the information were collected as part of the process, and not disposed of, then I'd have thought it should be queryable under the OIA. Obviously it'd still be subject to the criteria for determining release vs refusal.
It's a fairly minor concern for me, anyway. I was just curious if it's possible to look at some of the other voting patterns that didn't directly impact the final result.
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Hard News: Art with a job to do, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Oh, were they counted manually, then? Somehow I'd imagined that there would be a digital scanning process with any ambiguous ballot papers then being diverted to a real person.
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Hard News: Art with a job to do, in reply to Paul Campbell,
Even then, that’s only an abbrieviated (and conveniently lossless) method of simply publishing every vote. If there were more options and an order of magnitude more combinations, there are still no more than a few million votes in total. A file or spreadsheet with a few million lines to indicate the combinations of each vote is not a massive undertaking for any random person to process in this day and age.
From memory the Electoral Commission sometimes doesn’t publish election count details from polling places with very small turnout if there’s a concern that it might let a person with their vote be identified. Fair enough, but is there any real risk that a particular preference combination out of 1m+ in a postal ballot could be traced back to a specific individual?
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Of these, 1,204,993 chose a fern as first preference. That is 78.9% – a massive majority.
Are there any reasons to prevent the Electoral Commission from releasing the complete voting configuration for all ballot papers, instead of just the count summary? The ballot papers themselves get destroyed, but the data from them probably went into a counting system.
There's a presumption by many that everyone who liked either Lockwood design preferred the other straight after. Yeah, probably, but I'm curious to see if this is true instead of just declaring that it's true without actual evidence. The nature of how the count works means that the result summary doesn't show what those 1.1 million people's second preference was.
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Hard News: Change for the Better, in reply to Hilary Stace,
She might be popular but she’s also very polarising. I think part of her success was probably that the main alternative put up was John Morrison.
Duncan Garner’s problem is likely just a Green Party hating thing, and not wanting to give any credence to the possibility that someone with affiliations could possibly be doing something beneficial.
It’s a shame, because national media used to employ people with an intent of report non-Auckland issues with some semblance of objectivity. I guess employing people to research and know stuff is less cost effective than having talking heads spouting vacuous opinion as a substitute.
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On a related topic to Russell's post, yesterday's Mediawatch contains a 7 minute segment discussing media coverage of Auckland's Nelson Street cycleway and Wellington's Island Bay cycleway.
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Hard News: Change for the Better, in reply to Sacha,
results in no conviction for off-duty bus driver
Does anyone know why? The article doesn't seem to make that clear.
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Hard News: The positive option of Red Peak, in reply to Sacha,
1 in 7 current New Zealanders chose the top option.
Even a figure that high depends on interpretation, given it took 4 counts to reach that many. Anyone who ranked this option anything but 5th is counted in that final number.
Also, voters were asked to rank their preferences between the options provided. They weren’t asked if they preferred any of them more than the current flag.
I’m figuring the second referendum's result will probably correlate with its turnout. (Maybe this alternative will win if there’s a low turnout.) Still, it’s risky to make assumptions about why anyone votes the way they do, though. Like an election, a referendum only counts votes, not reasons.