Postal voting is dying
Stuff reports:
Online voting, or a return to the polling booth, could be needed for local body elections as the postal voting system cannot be “guaranteed”, Local Government New Zealand (LGNZ) says.
“We don’t believe that we can rely on the postal services for local elections in the long term.”
Mike Reid, policy director for the organisation, told the Justice Select Committee on Thursday that the slow fadeout of postal services meant that postal voting – the main method of voting in local government elections – was becoming very problematic, and it would be hard to guarantee every vote was counted.
“Our issue is effectively that the quality of postal elections can’t be guaranteed. We can’t guarantee that people who vote by post can get their vote counted, any more,” Reid said.
Postal voting is highly insecure, cumbersome and dying off. People simply don’t go into post offices any more.
If they don’t introduce an option to allow you to e-mail or upload your ballot paper, then they will need to bring back booths and have scores of them around each city.