Pōti ahau – I voted (2022)

Today I cast my vote for Hamilton City Council and Waikato Regional Council elections at the St Andrews branch of the Hamiton library, the closest drop-off point to my house. It was a 20 minute drive in traffic.

I was originally just going to post it, but since that meant driving at least 15 minutes, I decided to see how long it would take—and how difficult it would be—to go to the library closest to my house. There was a drive-in and drop-off thing at a supermarket in Dinsdale, not far from the Dinsdale branch of the library (the next-nearest branch to my house), though the drive-on thing was only announced this morning, which seemed a bit poor. The main reason I chose not to go there was that the driving time would’ve been longer than what I chose.

The only trouble I had was that Apple Maps sent me a different way than I’d have chosen—though I couldn’t know that at the time, since I’d never been to the area the library’s in. It was fine in the end.

Hamilton City Council has done a pretty poor job of making it easy to vote, a topic I’ll return to soon, but the main issue this year was that there were FAR too few drop off points, and none at all in the entire northwestern part of the city. I’ll go into more detail about all that when I talk about reforming New Zealand’s awful systems for local elections.

Right now, I’m just glad it’s done for another three years. Also, a kind librarian snapped the photo above for me. Where would the world be without librarians?!