Elections 2010

Site purpose

Many people in New Zealand don't vote in local body elections. Relying on newspapers and voter packs received in the mail to know who they could vote for is not enough for some people make an informed choice. It was hoped that a website providing clear information about who people could vote for, and how to vote, would raise the rates of participation. The site provides simple access to profiles about local candidates all in the one place, and also carried the election results in real time, providing another reason for people to vote in the next election.

What we did

The elections2010.org.nz site had a very tight time frame, but we were up to the challenge. SilverStripe's work for the site included:

• design
• information architecture
• development
• performance work
• server setup
• support around the clock.

People wanted to know who was winning around the country, so it was vital that elections2010.co.nz stay up to provide those answers. stuff.co.nz, the most popular news website in the country, was linking to the elections website, and was the single biggest source of traffic. That’s why we used Dawn, our website monitoring software, to keep an eye on the site.

What users can do now

The site has two main areas - Candidates and Vote.

In the Candidates area, you can search by location or use the A-Z listing to find a particular candidate's profile. The candidates could submit their own profiles to the site, and answer questions that voters have asked of all the candidates in an area. Candidates could upload videos to support their campaigns, and see what their opposition is up to.

The Vote section of the site provides the answer to the question "who can I vote for?". It uses electoral boundary data hosted by Auckland-based Ko-ordinates combined with Google Maps to be able to determine which elections New Zealanders are eligible to vote in, based on their home address.

The site allowed the public to compare candidates' top five areas of priority, and to see questions other people in the area had asked - as well as submit their own questions and get answers.

The homepage also features news from the Local Government Online website, and real-time updates of the election results as they are counted, with automatically generated bar graphs. To represent public opinions, the site streams a Twitter search of everyone using the #e2010 hashtag to talk about the elections.

Measures of success

This is the first time a website lists the entire country’s thousands of candidates, and the site has the support of chief executives from all councils.

A huge benefit for local councils was that the site reduced their workload by providing centralised information about the elections - and it didn't cost them anything.

On October 9, results for New Zealand’s Local Body Elections were announced. The day saw over 80 mayors and hundreds of other local representatives democratically elected. The traffic for the 24 hours from noon Saturday to noon Sunday included these statistics:

• Over 15 million hits
• Almost 1 million page views
• Over 80,000 visits
• Over 40GB traffic (notable given it is mostly a text-based website, with few images. All video content is served through Youtube, and not part of this statistic).

Elections2010.co.nz has demonstrated that the local government sector can be innovative in its use of the web.

Reuse for 2011 General Elections

LGOL were able to reuse the project code for the 2011 General Elections. SilverStripe made minor changes to the visual design, and substantial changes to the business logic to accommodate differences between local and national elections in New Zealand. The resulting website, www.vote.co.nz, enabled voters to learn about political candidates and parties prior to the election day, and then check election results as they were counted.