John MacDonald: Here's how to get more people voting in local body elections - Canterbury Mornings with John MacDonald

You can call me a nerd, if you want to. But I reckon there is nothing like the performance of walking down to your local polling booth on voting day and casting your vote.

The way we do every three years when we’re electing a Government. In the general election.

There’s no confusion. It’s well-publicised. You can do early voting, if you want to or need to. But we all know, don’t we, that when we wake up on a particular Saturday morning every three years - we know it’s voting day.

Not so straightforward, though, when it comes to voting for our local council. Which, let’s face it, actually has more sway over our daily lives than central Government.

And I think we need to merge the general election with local body elections, which I’ll get to shortly.

But, for some reason, in the spirit of trying to make it easier for us to vote in our local elections, we’ve actually made it more difficult.

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