Posts by Phil Lyth
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Legal Beagle: Paula's Peril; or The…, in reply to Russell Brown,
Do feel very welcome to report any observations here.
Big ups to Robert Peden for having the cojones to post the polling place data based on preliminary count. Another development in scrutiny of the process.
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exactly 20 votes found lying around somewhere all with Bennett’s name on them? or exactly 20 votes discounted for Sepuloni.
...you might actually want to wait until he releases his judgement next week
and
I believe you got to come to an electoral petition with specific grounds for complaint.
Agreeing with much of what Craig said, particularly re grounds being needed for a petition.
But IMHO, a net change of 20 votes on a recount (apparently now official) is a massive shift. Having scrutineered and counted various elections, the number of votes where the intent is doubtful is miniscule.
The Waitakere vote was just over 30,000. Say 1 in 100 is arguable - and the scrutinteers will know which votes are involved - that is about 300. The returning officer, the judge, and everyone else will know Hunua and other case law.
For a net change of 20 out of 300 or so, it seems the judge saw things in a much different manner to the returning officer.
As as aside, I saved from electionresults.govt.nz the data of votes cast at each polling place based on preliminary results. Be interesting to see, in Waitakere and elsewhere, what if any variations there are when compared to the final count.
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Looking at the relative votes for Maori, Mana, ACT, party informal, and United (31k, 24k, 23k, 19k, and 13k), there could be an argument for not only no threshhold, but also for informals to count as 'None of the Above': ie the seat does not get allocated.
Might be an incentive for more people to turn out.
Had the above applied for 2011, Conservative would have had 3 seats, Legalise Cannabis 1, and 1 seat would have been unfilled.
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Legal Beagle: Election #11: Notings, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
The local returning officer will have been damn careful.
And the party scrutineers will have good info on exactly how many and which voting papers are in dispute (although thanks to the black sticker system, not whose votes they are.)
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Back. There were 19,874 informal party votes - you could argue 'None of the Above' soundly beat United, and came within 5,000 votes of both Act and Mana.
53,344 informal candidate votes. In individual electorates, informal candidate votes ranged from 1.5x to well over 5x the informal party votes. Some would have been accidental, most I expect were deliberate.
Are there more informal candidate votes when a party is not running? We'll see when the split vote reports come out. Graeme, the Electoral Commission expects to have these online next week, "subject to any judicial recounts" they said. (For the election: referendum info in January.)
From 2008 in Ohariu, 15% of Green voters gave their electorate vote to Dunne, or 527 people. You can't assume all Green votes would have gone to Chauvel.
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Legal Beagle: Election #11: Notings, in reply to Joshua Arbury,
Lefties really need to learn how to vote strategically.
It's a heroic assumption to think that everyone would vote Goldsmith (or Chauvel) if Parker / Hay (or Hughes) had not been on the ballot paper.
Interesting to note (I haven't pulled the numbers yet) that the candidate informal votes were generally several times the number of party informal votes in each electorate.
That is, there were a lot more people who knew the party they wanted, and not the candidate, than the other way around.
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Hard News: The Next Labour Leader, in reply to James Littlewood*,
And yes, some hundres of thousands also saw fit to vote for Winston.
Not quite that many - 135,000 plus whatever the specials add - maybe 150k in round terms.
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Legal Beagle: Election '11: the special votes, in reply to Raymond A Francis,
Always has been. I am disappointed that we still have to wait at least 10 days for a result. In 2011, you'd think that specials could be got to returning officers a lot faster.
I put that to Simon Power recently but sadly he didn't share my view.
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Legal Beagle: Election '11: the special votes, in reply to Rachel Prosser,
Ah, this will also be highly relevant for Chch Central, Waimakariri and Waitakere
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Brent
Largest number of candidates in an electorate in 2011 is 12, in Wgtn Central. In 2008, Wgtn Central had 14, again one of the largest if not the largest number.
And it would be a miracle if votes were evenly distributed as in your suggestion.
Interestingly, '5% of votes' vs '5% of winner's votes' would seem to not make a lot of difference, taking a quick look at 2008 results.