Voting in Elections

Low Turnout

There has been a lot of comment in the media this week about the low turnout of voters in the Local Body Elections. It seems votes are running at an even lower rate than three years ago, around 20% for this stage of the cycle.

Former New Plymouth mayor Peter Tennent has been encouraging everyone to get out and vote, both in the press and on Facebook.

I have several suggestions for improving voter turnout.

My first concern is he voting age. 18 is an age when teenagers are thinking of everything else besides local politics. They have many decisions to make and decision fatigue means they put the politics in the too hard basket.

If we were to lower the qualification age to, say, 12, young people would be able to concentrate more on that issue, and they would still be in school, and at a stage when all intermediate teachers could be expected to spend some time teaching their classes about how the system works.

Once in the habit of voting at the younger age, the teenagers would be less likely to give up through decision fatigue.

My second concern is the number of candidates one has to choose from. Even though I have lived in this town for forty years, and been involved in the community most of that time, I still don't know more than a couple of the candidates.

To make the process easier, the area should be broken down into wards. But not the usual geographical ones. My suggestion is that if the wards were defined by age bands, we would be more likely to know the candidates in our ward.

So, in a city with ten councillors, one would have ten wards according to date of birth. Candidates would not have to be from the age-band; if teenagers wanted to elect someone of their parents' generation, or vice versa, that should be possible.

But it should mean we get a council more spread over the age range and so more representative of the community. And the decisions about who to choose would be a whole lot simpler.

It would be possible to think of other ways of splitting the area, but they would be more complicated and more controversial. Keep it simple!

What do you think?