Not a single Auckland councillor spoke up for keeping postal voting when Mayor Wayne Brown polled the room at a Governing Body workshop on the 2028 local elections.
“You’ll be pleased to know that nobody wanted post,” Brown declared after working his way around the chamber and the screens at last month’s session.
The informal show of preference binds no one, but it is the clearest signal yet of where the Council will land when it makes its formal decision on 1 September.
Councillors must choose between postal voting, general election style booths, or running both, alongside decisions on the voting system and the order of names on the ballot.
The stakes were set by last year’s election, which produced a record low turnout of 28.6 per cent and saw the Court void the Papatoetoe subdivision result over postal security failures, a first in New Zealand.
Staff told the workshop a booth election held on a single day could cost between $114 million and $184 million at 40 per cent turnout, against roughly $15 million for postal.
Spreading booth voting over ten days would drop the estimate to between $51 million and $79 million.
Brown pushed staff to run the election through the city’s 57 libraries.
“Other places have libraries that have up to fifty booths because it’s just a piece of cardboard,” he said.
Councillor Ken Turner arrived with the agenda from the last term’s costing exercise, which he said had priced booth voting at about $30 million.
“You’re trying to scare us into getting a postal service, which isn’t postal,” he told officers.
“The cost of good democracy is what it is.”
Election programme manager Elodie Fontaine responded that the earlier figure covered little beyond staffing, while the new estimates priced all new IT, hardware and logistics.
The numbers have already moved, with reports sent to local boards this month putting a ten day booth election at $39 million to $55 million and postal at $15.5 million.
Deputy Mayor Desley Simpson told the workshop she had backed postal in the past purely on cost but now supported booths, and wanted election costs raised with the Government in regional deal negotiations.
The lone sustained caution came from councillor Andrew Baker, who supported booths but warned the change was “a costly experiment”.
He said the real reason people do not vote is that they “don’t have confidence in councils”, and he feared turnout would fall rather than rise.
There was no support for switching from first past the post to STV, with Brown noting nobody raised a hand when he asked.
Maurice Williamson joined the opposition, joking that STV “sounds more like something you’d treat at a health clinic rather than have as a voting system”.
Councillors who spoke on ballot order favoured keeping alphabetical names, with Williamson arguing that if voters do not look up a candidate’s name, “then you were never gonna get their vote any rate”.
A booth only election would currently shut out about 35,000 overseas and non resident ratepayer electors, unless the Government legislates to allow electronic transmission of their votes.
Officials said the Department of Internal Affairs cannot commit to that change until an incoming minister is briefed next year.
The costings include five or six mobile booths to serve retirement villages and hospitals, and phone voting remains available for disabled voters whatever method is chosen.
The Howick Local Board demanded an “urgent and immediate shift away from postal voting to booth voting” in its April feedback on the Council’s election inquiry submission, and local boards gave their formal views on the new reports this month.
If councillors confirm the change, 2028 would deliver Auckland’s first in person local election since the 1980s.
