Posts by Keir Leslie
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Except that it's a well known result in political science that voting/not-voting is a habit so it is likely that it wouldn't be a momentary bounce, it'd be a long term shift in voting propensity amongst the affected cohorts.
Further, yes, it won't fix the ongoing decline in voter turnout. No thing on it's own will fix that, not even those things which when put together will.
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If you think that the line is driving, sex, and leaving school, the voting age should be 16.
(PS hear hear Hilary!)
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Given that contact and engagement via political parties is a driver of voter turnout I do think we should make it easy for parties to communicate with voters if we are serious about increasing turnout and engagement.
It’s also not the case that if you stop people accessing roll data they’ll no longer have access to that kind of data. It will just cost more and be less accurate, which will primarily hurt small and left wing parties.
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As far as direct mail goes, (a) modern campaigns can be very very targetted, and often use demographic, geographic, and other data in ways it would be extremely hard if not impossible to replicate through an NZPost interface, and (b) it would be prohibitively expensive to use NZPost to print, sort and send mail compared to the current system of volunteer sorting and deliveries. So in practice the parties that could afford would buy private databases and use them (as they do in America) and parties that couldn't would struggle.
Similarly, it is in principle possible to do door-to-door canvassing absent a database of voters, but it means you can't do enrolment work (because you can't tell who's enrolled or not) and if you wanted to do anything with the information gathered, you'd end up creating your own database as you went - at which point, again, some parties would buy commercially and others would struggle.
Finally, it would be very hard to campaign in the Māori seats absent accurate roll data.
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Up Front: Reviewing the Election, in reply to Emma Hart,
The reason Rob (or rather, Rob via the NZLP) should have access to electoral roll data is that voter contact by political parties is a key driver of voter turnout, and voter engagement with the electoral system. And there's a similar argument for non-party groups that want to use the data for civic engagement purposes - Greenpeace might want to talk to voters about what this election means for climate change, for instance, and that might engage and motivate people to participate and vote.
I agree with you beyond that though - I don't see why any private individual should be able to access the Roll other than for limited purposes of public scrutiny. (Which is why I don't like the "chuck it on the internet and ban commercial use" answer - there's lots of people who wouldn't care about that ban, and there's lots of people who'd be doing things that it'd be impossible to police but still nasty.)
At present the rules around the Roll are very weak and lead to some stuff that I think is pretty worrying, even aside from the debt collection etc issues. For instance, David Farrar used the National Party's copy of the Roll to try to look up a female MP's home address in order to pass it on to Cameron Slater, although I don't think it ever ended up on WhaleOil. I can't think of a good reason to let that sort of thing happen. (Which also makes me pretty doubtful of how much to trust political Parties with Roll data.)
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The recommendations on the Electoral Roll run pretty contrary to Rob Salmond's arguments that the data be made more open - interesting to see it come up here.
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There is no "official church of the UK".
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Hard News: About Campbell Live, in reply to Russell Brown,
But huge parts aren't - and there's a massive chunk of audience which is vital to the public service mission. In particular, you could spin off the non-public service aspects and keep the other bits - although I'm very wary of the kind of purism that leads to public service broadcasting no-one watches. Apart from anything else, there's a bunch of historical content that it would be a sin to flog off.
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I suspect that at this rate you'd have the choice between buying Hosking or Henry!
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Hard News: About Campbell Live, in reply to Russell Brown,
Wouldn't it be almost certainly more cost-effective to turn TVNZ into a proper public service broadcaster? We turned it into a commercial one, no reason you couldn't do the reverse, surely?