Mawera Karetai

Gosh, this is going to be an interesting local body election. This year, like every other, a bunch of people are going to sign up for the mayoral race just for the extra platform time the mayoral candidates get.

The problem with this is that it:

1. Takes focus away from the importance of the mayoral role, and,

2. It dilutes votes, and we can end up with a mayor who thinks they have a mandate, but really, they just didn't have competition similar enough to split votes.

I'd like to encourage people organising candidate events to make sure they allocate sufficient time to councillor candidates and ask candidates to choose whether they speak as a mayoral, or councillor candidate - not both.

This might discourage the mayoral platform filling up with people who know they won't win but just want the exposure.  It will also stop candidate events running late and becoming boring.

I do wish our council had changed over to a Single Transferable Vote model at their last democracy review. I can't believe we are still running a First Past the Post election, where more people vote against the winning candidate than for them, and yet they still get to lead.