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This story was first published on RNZ.co.nz and is being republished with permission.
Not because of a divine vision, although Pastor Rob Markley sometimes wonders if there is “something spiritual” at stake, but because, on a Saturday every three years, he hosts a kind of democratic miracle.
The benches are moved across the sturdy gray carpet, replaced by cardboard voting booths, and the doors open to all attendees. Roughly a thousand people cast their votes in the church at each election, and they do so almost exactly according to the way the nation votes.
Of the roughly 2,500 polling places across the country, Birkenhead Baptist is one of eight that got the party vote quite well in 2017, 2014 and 2011, and the only one that did well in 2008 as well.
For such a remarkable record, the church is unremarkable.
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The building, on Birkdale Road on Auckland’s North Shore, is low brick with a square corrugated roof – a simple wooden cross on the facade is the only thing that distinguishes it from the Chorus telecommunications building next door. Its next neighbor is Birkenhead Transport Station, where a phalanx of pale yellow buses pull up every night.
“We’re a bit dated and in bad shape … we’re not flash on the inside,” says Markley. “The furniture is a little worn and the carpet is worn.”
The surrounding area of Birkdale is pick-and-mix: wooden bungalows facing the street, smaller fibrolite houses tucked away in rights-of-way, a cluster of retirement apartments on a corner. The residents are a similar mix of income and background, and many of them come to Kathy Mavaia’s salon, across from the church, to do their hair and get a wool.
Clients talk a lot about the choice, although they are shy about revealing who they support. “They are a little careful because it can get quite hot,” says Mavaia. The Covid-19 response is the problem on most people’s minds, you think.
CLAIRE EASTHAM-FARRELLY / RNZ
Hairstylist Kathy Mavaia has lived and worked in Birkdale for 12 years.
“There is a lot of talk about Jacinda … if she can get us out of this mess.” But she is already happy to announce the result of the referendum on cannabis. “Many people want to vote to legalize cannabis; every type of person you can think of has been saying they want to vote for that. “
Birkdale’s precision in each choice does not surprise her. “There’s a wide variety of people, from lawyers to cleaners, they all walk into the room,” he says. “It’s so diverse and that’s why you get everyone’s different opinions, which is all of New Zealand, I guess.”
However, demographics do not fully explain which voting booths end up as benchmarks.
Based on census data, none of the areas in which the most striking polling booths are located, including Birkdale, are outliers for ethnicity or income, but neither are they indicators of New Zealand demographics as a whole.
Joe Johnson / Stuff
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What is striking is that the eight polling places are in areas with a slight bias towards Asian residents and Pākehā. “I know what it will be,” says Dr Lara Greaves, a political researcher at the University of Auckland. “Maori and Pasifika, especially Pasifika, but also Maori, are much more likely to vote for Labor than nationals. Therefore, they are less likely to go National when there is a popular leader…. So they would simply over-represent Labor voters wherever there are Maori and Pasifika. “
Rather, research shows that Asian and Pākehā voters appear to have fewer partisan attachments, Greaves says, so an area where both groups are overrepresented means a population of voters that is more likely to change with the prevailing political mood. .
Pick an area of the country that represents New Zealand’s demographics, down to education levels, religious beliefs, and home ownership levels, and the results from the polls are not entirely accurate. RNZ identified a block in Saint Andrews in the Hamilton West electorate last year that represented New Zealand in miniature, but the results of the nearest polling place at Vardon Elementary School were a long way off, and voters in the area were they leaned toward National in every election. The better Labor fared nationally, the more out of date the polling place became.
For a long time in New Zealand’s political history, Hamilton West was one of the two traditional leading electorates, along with neighboring Hamilton East. “[They] They used to be the ones people talked about: Where Hamilton goes, the country goes, ”says political pollster David Farrar. “That was certainly quite correct for many years.” However, National has retained those seats since 2005 despite two government changes.
Using entire constituencies as indicators is not as feasible with MMP as it was with the first step, Farrar says. “You still get that in countries like the United States, where you can pinpoint tipping point states … You can still find areas that tend to be a reflection of New Zealand, so they give you an early look at what’s on. happening, but I don’t think they are as predictive as they were in the past. “
Contrary to intuition, looking at individual voting booths could provide a more accurate picture of voting trends, he says. “You get some polling places that reflect [a] suburb as a whole and that suburb [happens to be] a nice microcosm of swing voters, the ones who tend to switch between National and Labor. There are some areas where no matter how good a day the National Party or the Labor Party is having, it’s still going to be 70 to 80 percent of that party. “
In his polling work for National, Farrar has resorted to looking at groups of polling places that he knows are accurate to give him an idea of how the results are going on election night, which the Elections Commission reports on a position-by-position basis. “There are more sophisticated ways to do it … but if you just want to get a very quick and easy way to do it, that’s what we would do.”
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Not everyone in the area is a swing voter. Peter Abel and his wife Maraia, who opens the door with a big toothy smile, live on a side street from the church, where they have voted most of the elections. The couple emigrated to New Zealand in the early 1970s, when Norman Kirk was prime minister. Peter liked Big Norm; he liked the Labor Party he led. He cast his first vote in this country for Labor and has been doing so ever since.
He will walk to the Baptist church again on October 17, his 16th election, and will vote for Jacinda Ardern’s Labor Party. “Jacinda has been good to us retirees – she increased our electricity [winter energy payment]. “
Abel does not announce his leanings for the party, but the fences that line Birkdale Road are dotted here and there with billboards, mostly national and Labor. Whether the Birkdale area will retain its leadership status or become more polarized may depend on how the face of its population evolves. Rob Markley hasn’t noticed much change in the nine years he’s been there, but he says that as one of the few remaining affordable areas on the North Shore, it attracts first-time home buyers. “So there are a certain number of upwardly mobile families that have reached out to enter the area, but have been able to buy houses.”
The white weathertight siding of Daniel Maienen’s house looks freshly painted and a wooden handrail leading to the front door is still smooth and honeyed, not yet bleached gray by the sun. A small, bouncing shadow yells behind the glass door and unsuccessfully rushes into the hole when Daniel opens it. “You’ll have to go in,” Mainet says, holding the door with one hand and grabbing Tucker the pug’s neck with the other.
CLAIRE EASTHAM-FARRELLY / RNZ
Daniel Manemos recently moved to the area and will vote at Birkenhead Baptist Church for the first time in October.
Manemos and his partner Ash bought this house less than a year ago and live with a couple of roommates. To him, it makes sense that the area is a barometer of political opinion. “It really is everyone and anyone in this kind of area.”
He is on the Maori list and says the party’s policies around tikanga and Maori representation are important to him, along with the environment, sustainability and what he describes as the “rebuilding” of the New York economy. Zealand in a post-Covid world.
He voted for Labor in 2017, in part because he liked the party’s housing policies. “We were buying our first home and that prompted the decision.” He is still waiting to see what policies are announced in the run-up to the elections, but he does not expect to change his vote. “Personally, I’d be better off leaning towards National, given my income band and I also own a home… but we’re only in that position because of what happened before. So it would be really unfair for me to say now, okay, I got what I wanted, so now I’m going to change my vote. “
There is also diversity beyond the main festivals in Birkdale. One of the residents of the retirement flats says she has been a strong advocate for New Zealand First for years, though she wonders aloud if leader Winston Peters is getting over it: “He’s too old.”
Rob Markley says the people he meets in Birkdale would not be Labor voters, “but neither would I necessarily expect them to be national voters.”
This will be Markley’s fourth election since he became pastor of Birkenhead Baptist. Do you ever feel any tension between your role as a place of worship and an occasional outpost of political expression? Not really, he says. “In fact, I like the idea of the church being a voting booth…. In a bygone era, churches were the center of their communities ”.
After all, there is something reverent about Election Day: the seriousness of the adults lining up grabbing their EasyVote cards; surveillance of voting personnel; and the quiet calm of a cardboard voting booth where anyone, regardless of their background, can make a secular confession that is only between them and their ballot.
The precision of the voting booths was based on how much the party vote for each party that won a seat in Parliament deviated from the national vote in each election. RNZ selected the 100 most accurate cabins in the 2011, 2014, and 2017 elections and calculated their average (mean) rating, keeping only those cabins with an average rating of 50 or better (to represent a slightly “ off ” year on a otherwise high precision execution). This left eight spots, and only Birkenhead Baptist Church also appeared in the top 100 spots in 2008 (at No. 7).
This story was first published on RNZ.co.nz and is being republished with permission.
