A good election reminder of the world outside Twitter

Stuff reports:

The incumbent centre-right political group has repeated its clean sweep of the election for Entrust, the consumer trust which owns the majority of the electricity lines company Vector.

But the dismal turnout in the triennial postal ballot has fallen to a record 9.64 per cent, compared with the previous record low of 12.44 per cent in 2018.

The National Party-leaning Communities and Residents (C&R) ticket retained all five seats on Entrust, with the new trustees including two former National MPs Paul Hutchinson and Denise Lee, a former party board member Alastair Bell, and Michael Buczkowski and William Cairns.

The highest polling unsuccessful candidate was Emma McInnes, from the newly-formed More for You, Better for Climate group, who missed the cut 838 votes behind re-elected trust chairman William Cairns.

I was interested in the results of this election, as I thought it might be a useful reminder of how unrepresentative Twitter is.

The MFUBFC group were everywhere on Twitter. I saw tweets and hashtags for them hundreds and hundreds of times. If Twitter was your world, then they were everywhere. I’m not sure I can even recall a single tweet or hashtag for the C&R team. The ration of profile between the two was probably at least 50:1.

Yet the C&R team won in a clean sweep.

Even though the MFYBFC team was from the left, that didn’t mean some of their candidates weren’t impressive. In fact I even have some money invested with a fund managed by one of them. I regard him as a very smart business operator. So the problem for MFYBFC wasn’t the quality of their candidates – I think it was that they seemed to spend so much time online preaching to the converted rather than reaching out to those not on social media.