Local body election bug explanation still awaited

Datamail is still declining any detailed comment on the technical failure that held up results from local body elections. The Office of the Auditor General is involved and a complete review was still taking place last week into both the technical and administrative aspects of the process.

“The OAG is scrutinising each aspect of the individual results for District Health Boards and Councils, and until that’s been completed it would be premature to talk about it,” says Datamail spokesman Ian Long.

Computerworld understands that the root cause of the miscalculated results was that some batches of votes failed to pass from one stage of the counting process to the next, though it is unclear why the batch totals that are traditionally employed to check for such missing data did not appear to signal the failure at an early stage.

A statement could be forthcoming by this week, Long said last Wednesday.

Datamail was contracted by organiser ElectioNZ to process the count .