Getting NZers to vote

Great to see that people are starting to look very seriously at the 74.2% rate in the 2011 general election.

Radio NZ have done a very good program me looking at non-voting and declining turnout. It’s 28 minutes long, and well worth a listen. You can download an MP3 of it here.

Thanks to Jordan Carter for the heads up.

How much did each vote cost?

The electoral commission has just realeased the party vote expense returns. Well worth a read. The stand out figure is the massive $1.7m that the Conservative Party spent. I would be very interested to know how much of that came from Colin Craig.

I’ve matched the expenditure against the number of party votes each party received to figure out how much each vote cost. The big losers at the Conservatives ($31.78 per vote) and ACT ($25.83). At those rates, it would have cost the Conservative Party $3,579,006 and ACT $2,915,328 to reach the 5% threashold.

At the other end of the spectrum you have the Aotearoa Leagalise Cannabis Party who spent $4,003 and managed to get over 11 thousand votes – achived largely off the back of their party name rather than their advertising efforts.

Early votes – the numbers

In the second part of my look into early votes I’ve taken a thorough dig through the election results. There was a fair bit of copy and pasting involved, so apologies if I’ve made any mistakes. All figures in this post refer to the party vote. If you’re so keen you’d like to see the dataset I’ve used, feel free to email me and I’ll send you a copy.

Firstly, I’ve taken a look at the number of early votes cast as a percentage of the total number of votes cast.

While there is a little variation at either end, the early vote in most electorates sits comfortably between 10-14% of the total votes cast.

It is noticeable that Christchurch electorates are very well represented (Christchurch East 2, Christchurch Central 5, Waimakariri 8, Port Hills 10 and Wigram at 11) at the top end of the scale. I’m not sure if this is because Cantabrians voted early due to uncertainty about polling booth locations, because of some extra effort on the part of campaigns or the Electoral Commission, or some other factor. I’d welcome suggestions as to what might have happened.

And then I’ve also taken a look at how Labour’s party vote in early votes compared to their share of the rest of the votes (votes cast on the day, and special votes).

Again, while there are some big outliers, particularly Te Tai Tokerau and Tamaki at the bottom end, there is not actually a great deal of variation in the numbers here.

Of the 25 electorates where Labour’s share of the early votes was higher than their share of the other votes (or exactly the same in the case of Ohariu), they won 12, with several others being very close.

With a total of 287,113 early votes cast (or 12.73% of the total vote), it is clear that this is going to be a very important part of the electorate. If more and more people are going to be casting early votes, it is going to be important that campaigns do not rely on only communicating with them in the last week. Early campaigning is likely to become even more important.

That said, you often hear people talking about the percentage of people who make their mind up in the polling booth. I’d be very interested to see research regarding how this number is moving.

In defence of Peter Dunne

Okay, it really, really pains me to do this.

One of the things that I really dislike in politics are bold faced lies. By claiming that Dunne has no mandate to sell assets, that’s exactly what Russel Norman is engaging in. This sort of politics is never pretty.

The Greens are calling on United Future leader and MP for Ohariu, Peter Dunne, to ask voters in his Wellington electorate whether they want asset sales.

…

Greens co-leader Russel Norman said National and ACT had campaigned on asset sales but Dunne had not, and he now had the power to stop them.

The thing is, Peter Dunne did campaign on his stance on asset sales. And it just so happens that his policy is compatible with National’s. What a surprise.

I am glad that the Greens are fighting hard against the sale of state assets, and I’m sure that Labour and Mana will also be fighting them at every step of the way. But by claiming that Peter Dunne never campaigned on asset sales, Russel Norman is simply wrong.

Let’s be clear – the only reason Peter Dunne is in this mess in the first place isn’t because of Russel Norman, it’s because his policy platform was as wet as the water resources he doesn’t want to see sold. He campaigned against sales of assets that were never going to be sold. It’s infuriating having someone as limp as Peter Dunne in Parliament – but he should be criticised for his lack of spine, not a lack of truthfulness.

Looking at turnout

I’ve had the pleasure of spending a sunny Sunday afternoon looking at the turnout numbers of the 2011 general election. The total turnout was only 74.21% (down from 79.46% in 2008). In raw numbers, that’s 2,257,336 votes cast, as opposed to 2,356,536 – despite the growing population.

2011 turnout. Click to enlarge

Wellington Central has this time taken out the title of highest turnout, beating the 2008 champion, Otaki (I am expecting a call from Mrs Keall). At a guess I would assume this has a lot to do with both Labour and the Greens running strong get out the vote (GOTV) strategies – perhaps the only place in the country where two parties manage this.

At the other end of the spectrum, we again have all seven of the Maori seats, followed by the three South Auckland Labour strongholds (Manukau East, Manurewa and Mangare). The continuation of this trend is particularly disappointing. Some may find it surprising given that this year there were four parties running strong campaigns in the Maori seats (Labour, Maori, Mana and Greens) – the simple fact of the matter is that Maori are far more disassociated from the political process than perhaps any other group in society.

I’ve also analysed the swing in turnout…

Turnout swing. Click to enlarge.

The dramatic dip in the vote in Botany stands out. Perhaps this is due to them having a by-election so soon, and local body elections (and a council by-election) last year. Are the good people of Botany simply suffering from election fatigue?

Before I pulled these numbers I had a theory that there would be a dramatic drop in turnout in the Christchurch electorates due to the earthquake. We certainly saw that to some extent (particularly Christchurch East, Christchurch Central and Wigram), but not as much as I expected. The other factor to take into account is that a lot of people have simply fallen off the electoral roll as they’ve moved away from Christchurch (the total number of people enrolled in these electorates has dropped significantly). There is more work to be done to see if they have since gone and enrolled elsewhere (and thus will have some pretty big impacts on the next boundary change), or if there are many earthquake refugees who are not even enrolled.

The big question is why did so few people vote?

All sorts of theories are being rolled out: flow on impact from the Rugby World Cup, lack of online voting, simple voter apathy. One thing that I think really did have an impact was having the National Party above 50% in the polls for so long – I’d hazard a guess that a lot of people didn’t cast their vote because it looked so certain that it would be a cakewalk to victory.

The Maori and Green parties are calling for an inquiry into the low turnout (a good idea, but it really does remind me of Saramago’s novel Seeing).

Radio New Zealand had a particularly interesting interview with Thomas Patterson, a professor of government and press at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. He looks at our low turnout and points out that it’s in line with global trends. Take a listen here.

I’d be very interested to hear what you think about our low-level of turnout, and what can be done to slow or stop the trend.

(Almost) Final results released

With the exception of judicial recounts in Waitakere and Christchurch Central, the final results of the 2011 general election have been released. Congratulations to Carmel Sepuloni in particular – knocking off a popular cabinet minister in a year when the tide is out against Labour is no mean feat. Commiseration to those who have lost their seats.

Turnout was only 74.21% (down from 79.46% in 2008). This is very disappointing. The pundits will be discussing this until the cows come home, and from the conversations I’ve had with others already, there are some interesting theories emerging. I’ll be looking at some of these issues in the coming weeks.

I’ll also be updating my Labour candidate vote statistics in the next day or two. I also plan to investigate the variance in party vote and turnout , electorate by electorate. I have some theories already I intend to test.

But for now, I’m off to celebrate with the good folks from the Campaign for MMP. They can be particularly proud of their 57.77% result.

Labour’s electorate vote

One of the most paradoxical things to come out of the 2011 general election was that while Labour’s share of the party vote was decimated (down to 27.1%  - or a 6.9% swing against), a reasonable number of their electorate candidates managed to substantially increase their majorities.

Firstly, congratulations to all those candidates who managed to hold their seats (if Brendon Burns holds Christchurch Central on specials, then Labour have only lost one electorate – Waimakariri –  despite a massive swing against them).

Also, before we go any further, it is worth noting that there are lots of variables at play. For example, the Te Tai Tokerau swing is against the 2008 general election result, not the very close 2011 by-election. So please take things with a grain of salt.

For me there are some pretty obvious insights that jump out of the raw numbers.

If you look at the three “M” seats, Mangare, Manukau East and Manurewa, Labour managed to significantly increase their share of the vote, despite the turnout being in line with the nation-wide trend. This has to be due to a combination of factors working in Labour’s favour:

• The absence of Taito Phillip Field. In 2008, despite being booted out of Labour and facing corruption charges, he stood against Sua William Sio, and his Pacific Party stood candidates in the other “M” seats. They never had a chance of beating Labour, but they took a noticeable amount of the votes.
• It’s possible that elements of Labour’s policy platform – $15 minimum wage and GST off fruit and veges – struck a chord in these electorates which have high levels of social deprivation. That said, if we’re going to make untested, sweeping generalisations we have to admit that the people at the bottom of the heap are also the ones most likely to be disconnected from the political process.

Another point to note is that three of the top 10 seats in terms of swing are Maori electorates. One of the two new seats Labour picked up was Te Tai Tonga. Their candidate, Rino Tirikatene, pushed hard on the line that Maori Party voters were dissatisfied with the deal with National. So hard, that on election night, even Tariana Turia was admitting it…

“And it may well be … that they haven’t liked the relationship with National.”

The final point that jumps out is the fact that Labour obviously has some decent campaigners. Everyone on this list has done well (and to be fair, there are also another dozen or so candidates who have pulled in very respectable results). Robertson, Hipkins, Nash and Ardern all ran excellent campaigns. It really shows that one of Labour’s greatest losses on election night was Stuart Nash. I personally hope he sticks with it – victory in Napier is well within his grasp for 2014.

There are of course massive issues with the party vote, and turnout generally. I’ll save those for another day!

“A new generation that understands the call of change”

I am proud of the leadership of both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, but we lost the election, and we lost it badly and my message to the country is this: I know we lost trust, I know we lost touch, I know we need to change. Today a new generation has taken charge of Labour, a new generation that understands the call of change.

- Ed Miliband, 2010