Following on from our initial post on the expense returns from last year’s local body election, we’ve broken down the expense returns compared to how many votes each candidate got. You can see the full data set in our spreadsheet here.
So we’ve diced up the data and here is what we’ve found…
Click to see the graph full size.
As you’ll notice, the graph is heavily skewed in both directions. Six candidates not return expenses (O’Shaughnessy, Gareth Morgan, Price, Faiumu-Isa’Ako, Thomas Morgan and Allan Probert). At the other end of the scale, two candidate spent a very large amount of money for very few votes.
Every vote that John Bishop recieved cost him $38.63 and Adam Cunningham’s votes cost him an astounding $51.98 each!
So perhaps a better way to look at the numbers is to reduce it to the sucessful candidates. This makes the graph look like this…
Taking the average of these, it gives us a cost per vote of exactly $2.50 – which does seem more in line with reality. I guess the next piece of the puzzle would be to look at this in line with spending caps and turn out rates.
The two who stand head and shoulder above the rest here are councillors Eagle and Marsh. Both were new candidates, and spent a lot of money to make sure they had the name recognition they needed to win. In this context, I have to say I was surprised Justin Lester didn’t spend more (he spent almost half of what Helene Ritchie spent, and only slightly more than Ngaire Best).
WCC Watch 
What about costing council sourced email lists? It would also be interesting to see how many councilors used email addresses obtained from council submissions or communications to them in their capacity as a councilor before the election. Were these costed, or are they a perk of being a councilor? I know a number of people who were very surprised to receive campaign emails from existing councilors “during the election period”, some purporting to discuss council business. Effectively a cheap way of raising their name recognition.
How would you actually cost that? I think the issue you raise is an important one, but I don’t think it directly falls under electoral finance.
The saddest part would be if councillors only used their constituent details to get re-elected, rather than for genuine dialog during their term on council. I would hope that is not the case, but wouldn’t be too surprised if there were one or two who were doing that.
I’d suggest Fair market value (FMV) – base on the number of emails sent from council sourced email lists. IRD use FMV all the time for deeming value. The hard part would be getting honest disclosure. Ideally, councilors should not be allowed to use such email addresses at all during the deemed election period.