Election tidbits
Here are a couple of amusing articles to read about election day.
First: Isaac Freeman was an election day worker in the Auckland electorate of Maungakiekie and has blogged a fascinating account of his experience. For example, about the counting process, he writes:
At seven o’clock we closed the doors, put some cardboard tables together, and began the counting process… We each have one or two pieces of paper with names of candidates written on them. We place any votes for our candidates on their respective piles and pass any for other candidates to the person on our right. By this means, all the votes end up in the right pile and if any get passed on by mistake they’ll most likely be passed all the way round the table and come back to you. That’s how it’s written in the Personal Instruction Manual.
In practice, the first thing to do is work out who was going to count Labour candidate Mark Gosche’s votes, as it was readily apparent to all involved that this person would be doing a majority of the vote piling.
Flush with success from the rapid and efficient special-vote division, I volunteered for the Gosche pile. For the next hour or so I maintained an interior monologue that ran along the lines of “Gosche gosche gosche gosche gosche gosche gosche gosche not-gosche-pass-it-on gosche gosche gosche gosche gosche gosche not-gosche-pass-it-on gosche gosche gosche…â€? This continued until all 1500-odd ballot papers had been counted…
Based on what we could see in our polling place it was clear that Labour had won by a massive landslide, and that Mark Gosche was the Prime Minister. Oddly, it later turned out that neither of these patterns was closely followed across the country as a whole.
Second: Kiwis seemed to have a lot of fun listing our occupations for the electoral roll. Among the funniest were “lion tamer”, “parasite”, “Jedi Master” and “gaiety girl”. The Waikato Times has the story. Perhaps we should all make an effort to be funny next time round? Though, that’d be more than a little irresponsible for me to suggest - after all, political parties do use the occupational listing on the electoral roll for campaigning purposes 
September 30th, 2005 at 8:28 am
Do we have to use the American word “tidbit” instead of the good old word “titbit”? I expect it is a case of misplaced “correctness” as the word “tit” also means a breast. Are those small birds to be renamed “tids” ?
While I am on my soapbox I would also like to oppose the word “gender” being used instead of “sex”. The concept of gender is grammatical: luckily the English language does not use it, whereas in Latin, French, German etc. everything has a gender which may not be the same as its sex!
The trouble with using what are conceived as euphemisms is that they eventually take on the same stigma as the original word. When I was a teacher they gave a new word for the class of the lowest stream: “Vocational”. Within a week children were using the term “Voc” as a term
of abuse and contempt.
September 30th, 2005 at 8:52 am
In case my previous comment may seem a little grumpy, may I say that I much enjoyed the “Election Titbits” blog (among others).
It reminds me that one of my grandparents, in the UK 1901 census, put his occupation as “ventriloquist”, which I am sure he was not!