Running a voting booth

There’s more work than you might think in running a polling booth.

I spent last Saturday working as the manager of an inner-city polling place in the Wellington Central electorate. I had never done it before but when I was a kid my father and his mate once ran the polling booth in the forestry village we lived in on the Napier-Taupo Road. When they ran out of ballot papers, Dad printed off more on the school cyclostyler but before doing so he decided the ­clarity of the ballot paper could be improved, so he made some amendments then wondered for the rest of his life if he had disenfranchised the locals. Probably not. Electoral officials go out of their way to ensure every vote counts.

At the polling place I worked in there was a good mood all day. We had scrutineers from Labour, National and the Greens. At first, National’s party machinery seemed to be working best, as another party volunteer dropped in a small bag of morning tea for each of the party’s two scrutineers. It was not until after they had left, part-way through the afternoon, that a Labour Party volunteer arrived with a far bigger bag of provisions for its scrutineer. “I wish those guys from National had been here to see this,” she said wistfully, waving her big brown paper bag aloft.

Two older voters, accompanied by their preschool grandson, gave him their voting papers to drop in the ballot boxes. As he pushed the last one in, he said loudly, “What do we get?” “A government,” answered his grandmother. The little boy plainly thought he was entering a competition with a winner and some minor prizes on offer, too. Surely some new MPs from New Zealand First must also feel that’s how it happened.

Working at the polling booth has given me an appreciation of the enormous logistical exercise that is a general election. I had no sleep the night before, worrying about whether at the end of the night the number of voting papers we had issued would match the number of votes we had counted. It did. It was a very long day and for returning officers and other staff in each electorate, as well as the overall headquarters, it must have been longer still, and with plenty more such days before the final result is declared. I bet if they had the opportunity to vote for a four-year term, they would all tick that box.

Here in Wellington there is consternation that authorities did not tell the public there was a chance bits of concrete could drop off the roof of the 80-year-old Mt Victoria tunnel that links the eastern suburbs and airport to the city. Wellingtonians can only wonder whether the peculiar custom of motorists honking their horns in the tunnel contributed to its deterioration. I used to think only morons did it until someone told me it was how one car said hello to another. That put an altogether different and friendlier aspect on the whole thing and I, too, have become a honker. Not an incessant one, just a once-each-trip kind of honker and only if some other car says hello first. Now, people drive their visitors through just for the experience.

Many, many years ago, the father of a friend’s friend was so outraged by beeping behind him that he stopped his car in the very narrow tunnel and got out to remonstrate with the other driver. That seemed a draconian response to one car simply saying hello, but the friend who told me this story said her friend’s father worked for the Potato Board, which, in my friend’s eyes, explained everything.

What the hell has gone on in the lives of teenage boys and girls that they will gang up and seriously assault one of their classmates, as we’ve seen in two horrible cases this week? When the police charge the alleged aggressors, their parents should be in the dock, too, including, or especially, those adults who have had no role in their kids’ lives for years. That is not parenting.