Two university campuses vote blue
PLUS: Electoral Commission releases booth-by-booth data, allowing you to see how people in your neighbourhood voted.
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Hawke’s Bay
"If a man is not a socialist by the time he is 20, he has no heart. If he is not a conservative by the time he is 40, he has no brain," said Winston Churchill, presaging the later move of one Nevil Gibson from varsity communist to neo-liberal editor-at-large of NBR.
Students, overall, followed Mr Churchill's maxim with their votes on September 23 (see chart below).
Waikato undergrad Nathan Williams crunched data from the Electoral Commission's website and found a big tilt toward Labour and the Greens compared to the population at large.
However, there were two exceptions: ag-research specialist university Lincoln, and Massey's 17,000-student satellite campus on Auckland's relatively well-off North Shore, both of which saw National secure the most votes.
Although social media posts provided anecdotal evidence of a high youth turnout, an enrolment update provided by the commission on the eve of the election indicated no youthquake: Of 25 to 29-year-olds, only 76.79% were enrolled as of the September 22 update, vs 81.82% by election day 2014, itself pretty poor. Most age brackets had enrolment in the 90s.
Mr Williams drew his stats from the commission's preliminary results page, which as well as overall and electorate votes, breaks things down at the ballot booth by booth — so it's worth a visit to see how the neighbourhood voted at your local polling station (click the CSV or PDF options on the right).
You might also want to check out Auckland geographer Chris McDowall's visualisation of booth-by-booth results, overlaid onto a zoomable map of New Zealand (be patient, it takes a while to appear onscreen).
Click to zoom:
Chris Keall
Wed, 27 Sep 2017
Wed, 27 Sep 2017
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Two university campuses vote blue
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