Last-day rush to enrol
Hundreds of Canterbury people visited post offices and electorate offices yesterday in a last-minute bid to be enrolled as voters for next month’s General Election before the rolls closed at 6 p.m. yesterday. About 1200 people had handed over their enrolment cards at the Christchurch Central electorate office in the Chief Post Office by the time the rolls closed.
The Registrar of Electors for the Christchurch Central electorate, Mr Theo Bunker, said last evening that the office was normally staffed by one person. Yesterday it was staffed by eight, and this was boosted to 12 by the evening.
Mr Bunker said staff would sort the enrolment cards into electorates ready to be delivered into the hands of electorate registrars by noon today. The cards from other areas would be brought into Christchurch for transporting on to their own electorates. An aircraft was expected to leave Christchurch about 1 a.m. today, carrying cards for North Island electorates. Mr Bunker said he had worked through the weekend and was expecting to leave work at midnight last night.
He was due back at work at 6 a.m. today to start work on the first load of his own electorate’s cards from other districts. The aircraft was due in at 5 a.m.
Political campaigners had certainly helped to get people enrolled, Mr Bunker said. Yesterday morning many party representatives had brought in bundles oi cards collected at the weekend.
The rolls were going to be very high. “We had 95 per cent of all electors on the roll on Friday, and there have been a lot more since then,” he said. Although there were only two working days notice of the elections, more people would be getting on the roll than if the elections had been in November.
“They would have come
trickling in until then, but this snap election has provided an incentive for people to have their names on the rolls."
Very few people had not made an attempt to get their name on the roll, Those who could not come in, such as residents in old people’s homes, had telephoned and their cards had been collected.
The only people who will be able to cast special votes because they are not on the roll will be those who become 18 years of age between June 18 and July 14 and those people who have not met the three-month residential qualification for a new electorate and whc wish to vote in their old electorate. Printed rolls will be available for public inspection at post offices from July 9. They will list all enrolments made before 6 p.m. yesterday.
Voters who have shifted house in the last three months will have to wait almost until the last minute to have their eligibility to vote confirmed.
An inquiry to the electoral roll collection centre in Wellington, which was coordinating replies to voters’ questions, indicated voters who have lived in their new electorates for three months by July 9 can expect to receive an acknowledgement card after July 9, confirming their new electorate.
The card will carry a sticker identifying the voter as entitled to make a special vote in their new electorate, and the voter should take the card to the polling booth to prove his or her eligibility to cast a special vote in the new electorate.
A spokesman conceded that some voters might not have received their acknow ledgement cards by July 14, as they would be posted on July 9. The voter was still entitled to cast a special vote, however, in the new electorate.
The over-all cost would not exceed that of the present scheme, he said. Slightly higher contributions will be paid by some people. A flat rate of 6.5 per cent of salary has been set A sliding scale now means that people who joined between the ages of 17 and 29 pay 6 per cent of their salary while those who joined at or after 50 pay 11 per cent.
Membership of- the revised scheme will be wholly voluntary. At the moment State servants aged between 17 and 25' are compulsory contributors. A new provision means a member will be able to use contributions as collateral for loans from outside finance institutions. Where death occurs before retirement, as the scheme stood a spouse would get half of what the employee would have been entitled to had they retired on the day they died. This meant a small pension when people died young. The new scheme enables a payment of a lump sum which could be the one year’s salary or greater. The child’s benefit when death occurs before retirement changes from $7B a year to $2l a week.
When the snap election was announced, more than 260,000 voters had yet to sign up. This concerned the Labour Leader, Mr David
Lange, who said it would make it harder for the party to win.
Historically its supporters were “not good eerollers,” he said. However, the numbers not registered have been whittled down. The Minister of Justice, Mr McLay. announced yesterday that more than 29,000 enrolments had been received on Friday and that post office staff working at the week-end had processed an average of 300 for each electorate. Registrations continued at a steady pace through yesterday and by evening a spokesman for’the roll control centre in Wellington could report that there were “a lot in the pipeline” but that the final figure would not be known until today. Post offices had been asked to ensure they had adequate stocks of enrolment forms and any shortages had been met. He also said that printed rolls as at the end of May, this year, would be available from today and that small numbers of Habitation Indexes had been prepared for political parties.
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