Electoral Commission must be held to account

The Herald reports:

The Electoral Commission is undertaking “a full check” of the country’s voting resultsafter a Herald investigation led to three booths being found to have wrongly assigned hundreds of votes to fringe parties, while the National Party received none.

The commission has admitted a data entry error led to hundreds of votes being assigned to the Leighton Baker Party and the New Conservatives.

“A full check of all voting place results is being undertaken immediately to establish if there are any other transcription errors,” the commission said.

This is hugely concerning. Errors in the preliminary count are to be expected, but multiple errors in the final results are disturbing.

Even worse the errors may have never been detected if it were not for a journalist.

And the notion that wrong results have been declared because of data entry errors is also concerning. Does no one check and audit the data entry?

Chief Electoral Officer Karl Le Quesne said the number of votes involved was low and had little impact on the party vote.

“It does not affect the overall results, successful candidates or allocation of seats at all.”

Quesne said some party votes were recorded in the incorrect “row” for two voting places in the Port Waikato electorate and one voting place in Ilam.

At the Pukekohe Intermediate voting station in the Port Waikato electorate, 505 votes were incorrectly assigned to the Leighton Baker Party when they should have gone to National.

The Electoral Commission seems to be minimising the severity of this issue. Election results should not be dependent on data entry errors not occurring.

Acting Electoral Commission Board chairwoman Jane Meares said she has full confidence in the integrity of the election process and the results.

“A large amount of data needs to be entered to produce the results for a general election, and some mistakes due to human error can occur. However, the board will commission an independent review of the quality assurance processes in place,” Meares said.

How can you have full confidence when multiple errors occurred in the final results?

This comes on top on other issues such as the enrolment system crashing on election day, ballot paper shortages etc.

There is always a select committee review of each general election. I wonder if something more is needed this time, such as a full external review of the Electoral Commission by a panel of international electoral experts.