Just watched the final of a Brit tv series I enjoyed, thinking "I wonder what we'll get next Saturday?"
Silly me, is only the general election results.
Now voting in NZ is very high tech. I'll line up at my nearest polling station (a local school) already for them to look up my name in electoral register. Once found they write my line reference onto my voting papers and note the ref in relation to the voting paper number, and draw a line through my name on the printed register.
Next I wander over to the voting booth - made of corrugated cardboard so can be flat packed between elections - and get to weild a bright ORANGE mini marker pen and make my two ORANGE ticks. Only ticks are acceptable.
Two votes - yes one for the my choice of electorate mp (out of 14 candidates) and the other for my party vote (from a choice of 19 parties).
The ORANGE mini marker is attached to the cardboard voting booth by a length of knotted string. String colour may vary.
The votes get placed in a cardboard box which has plastic tie thingies on the corners for security.
(The school is only a 5 minute walk from my home, and always has great artwork from the kids on display.)
Mickle's Pickle: from our World's Southern most Capital City.
6 comments:
Sounds simple and fairly fool-proof.
I wish we'd have a bit more standardized procedures, in the USA, at least in Federal elections.
Here, each state is unique in their election process.
This state (Oregon) is one of the loosest states when it comes to voting. You send in a post card to register and you vote by mail, making it so easy for fraud. We have a Sec. of State who denies that there even is any fraud. (The candidate running against her wants to make the office non-partisan.) In our office we have identified over 100 fraudulent voters since we began calling to identify "likely voters", in July. We have a woman who works for us full time to weed-out these non-elegible voters and take them to the state for correction. We have had things like a woman who was going around her neighborhood asking people what their pet's names were and then later those people found out their pets were registered to vote! (she was in the other party) Other things she found were non-citizens, voters who received multiple ballots in their envelopes (only the other party), and dead voters. And that is just one office in one county!
We used to have to register by a state registrar and use identification, proving citizenship and legality.
See, I guess I'm a reactionary because I like the old ways.
Oh Priscilla- you don't even get to use the orange marker pen!
One of our local University uses Orange as their school's color. Their mascot is a beaver. The other school is green and yellow and they are the Ducks. How goofy is that?
what I wanted to say was that we see a LOT of orange around here.
I think orange was chosen because it is a politically neutral colour here. Not like in Northern Ireland......my Maternal Grandfather was born in Belfast
I usually vote in the cosy environment of our residence. We get all the necessary papers from the community by mail and I send them in by mail. Voting is here on Sundays and they close the polling stations at noon. Without the mail option, my vote would never make it in on time.
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