Districtwide Councilor Jackie Elliott informs us that the alphabetical order on voting papers impasse has been broken and in the up and coming Local Government elections, the Kapiti candidates names will be appearing on the voting forms in random order.
She is not sure for how many years names have been listed alphabetically, but it was a practice hotly defended by Kapiti’s longest serving councilors for many a triennium.
Councilors are required to chose the form of the voting papers before each election, either alphabetical, random, where the 25,000 or so papers are printed in the same, but non-alphabetical order, or true random where a computer pre-selects random orders and prints the voting papers in batches.
This is surely the fairest way to print the papers, and after trying for 6 years the KCDC will be joining a majority of councils across New Zealand and using the fairest process available. It was a unanimous vote, recommended by Cr Jackie Elliott.
A submission on this by Mr Trevor Daniels, representing Greypower Kapiti, said ‘If your name was Atholl the Aardvark, you had more than twice as much chance of being elected in an alphabetical listing board than poor old Rocky the Raccoon’.
The last might be true with ‘donkey voters’, as they are known, but it would be good to think that Kapiti electors are rather more interested and perceptive than that. —Eds