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Despite dissatisfied rumblings and a petition to change the voting system used in Dunedin, the Dunedin City Council yesterday voted to continue with a single transferable vote system.
Cr Andrew Whiley said he would welcome a petition demanding a poll on whether to shift to first-past-the-post and align with the vast majority of New Zealand councils, but some in the city needed to park their resentment over the last election’s outcome.
Some social media users had to acknowledge that Dunedin Mayor Aaron Hawkins was "elected by the residents of this city" for a three-year term, Cr Whiley said.
And the next time there would be a chance to exercise their democratic right to vote for mayor was 2022.
"Let’s get the city moving and let’s stop arguing about what happened in the 2019 election," Cr Whiley said.
Mr Hawkins said he found it hard to make a case against the current system, under which he was elected to his first term as mayor last year.
But he did not want others to use the cost of running a poll — estimated to be $220,000 — as a reason against asking voters for their preference.
"You can’t put a price on democracy," he said.
A petition is circulating in the city, promoted by the First Past the Post Working Group, seeking at least 5% of those who were enrolled to vote at the 2019 Dunedin election, or 4674 voters, to force a vote on the issue.
Chairman Pablo Dennison said many voters were struggling to understand the single transferable vote system and it was time to revisit the vote that put a stop to first-past-the-post voting in Dunedin’s city council elections in 2004.
The issue of whether the single transferable vote system — where voters use their one vote to choose candidates in order of preference, voting for as many, or as few, candidates as they like — was well understood was debated by councillors yesterday.
Cr Lee Vandervis argued as well against what he framed as bias from the council staff.
The report the councillors were considering yesterday relied only on information from Prof Janine Hayward, of University of Otago department of politics.
If council staff were not providing balanced reports, councillors could not make informed decisions, he said.