election day
We went down to our local polling station nice and early this morning. Not early enough to wait for them to open the doors, not early enough to risk being the first there, but early enough to get our civic duty done and get on with the usual Saturday chores before the afternoon's thunderstorm watch kicked in.
We got some rain around the middle of the day, but otherwise this thunderstorm watch has been quite anticlimactic.
Our local polling station was busy in the small town Aotearoa sense - a constant stream of people coming, getting their papers, ticking their choices, dropping their papers in the appropriate boxes, and getting on with their days. Enough for the staff to be constantly busy, not enough for a queue to form.
It was all very easy - show easy vote card, tell the staffer my name, take paper to booth, tick boxes, drop paper in box. It was a wee bit more hassle for The Wife. She couldn't find her easy vote card, so waited, scrolling through her emails looking for said card, while the staffer dealt with somebody else. The staffer was about to help her when she found the easy vote card. Then she was done and out within a few minutes.
The day's chores took us through our local mall. I was waiting outside one shop watching the polling station across the way. It was pretty much the same deal there - a short queue might form if a few people arrived at the same time, but they were sent in to collect their papers very quickly. Some had easy vote cards ready, some showed their driver licence. Some had to go the "no ID" route. At no point was anybody turned away.
Easy vote cards are for convenience only, other forms of ID help when people don't have their easy vote card, but the law does not require any form of ID to vote, and nobody can be legally turned away for not presenting ID.
Driving through the town it was nice to see what was not there - all placards and signs for candidates and parties gone. I'm guessing they had their teams out late last night running around making sure to take all the signs down before midnight.
Come to think of it, I didn't even see any scrutineers from any of the parties monitoring either of the polling stations I saw today.
And so another election goes, quiet, efficient, minimal fuss. I guess the fun starts when the counting starts. At 7pm, more or less when I plan hitting "publish" on this post, all the media will have their talking heads on spouting nonsense and reporting numbers. At some point this evening, probably pretty late, we'll have an idea of what the next parliament will look like. But then special votes will still need to be counted, and that usually takes a couple of weeks. And the parties will start their coalition negotiations.
So today, really, is a brief respite, a day of quiet when we can do our thing and trust the professionals to collect and count votes. The noise and nonsense of the campaign ended yesterday. The noise and nonsense of candidate and party reactions and coalition negotiations will start some time this evening.
Enjoy the quiet while it lasts.