Plenty of voters in the 2010 elections chose not to make a
choice on some, or in some cases any, of the local
authorities they were charged with electing.
Health boards, in particular, received plenty of "blank"
votes this year.
The final tally for the election showed 45,073 voting papers
were returned.
In the election for the Dunedin mayoralty, and for
councillors for the three city wards, there were 1296 blank
votes and 779 "informal" votes .
This year's election attracted 317 special votes, where
voters, for example, were overseas during the election.
Of those, 273 were valid.
Dunedin electoral officer Pam Jordan said informal votes were
mostly situations where people mistakenly ticked boxes for
single transferable voting (STV), when the boxes were meant
to have been numbered.
"That's the majority," she said last night.
Other informal votes were situations where the voters'
intentions were not clear.
In voting for the Otago constituency of the Southern District
Health Board, there were 7059 blank votes.
Board chairman Errol Millar said this week the low number of
properly filled-in papers for the heath board might be
because health politics was not full of high-profile
personalities and people often struggled to know who
candidates were.
The health board list was also the last local authority on
the voting papers.
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