Councils
Of the existing council candidates standing for the Invercargill City mayoralty the clear winner in this poll is Nobby Clark with all other candidates below the ‘None of above’ option.
The closest challenger is Darren Ludlow, followed by Ian Pottinger. This poll also confirms the communities rumblings that it’s time for change at the top with Sir Tim a distant fourth. It also confirms previous polls that Rebecca Amundsen doesn’t have the wow factor, if she did Ria Bond wouldn’t be polling higher than her. Every time another female candidate stands it will sink Bec’s chances further. (Word on the street is Toni Biddle plans to join in on the fun)
Candidate Noel Peterson who was a distant last with 48 votes getting a vote here and there over Thursday and Friday morning. Between mid Friday afternoon to evening suddenly an odd pattern emerged, Noel was at times getting as many as seven votes per minute and by 8:20pm he was on 260 votes. Further investigation in the SurveySparrow backend confirmed things didn’t add up. The decision was made to disqualify Noel from this poll. Whether people associated with or not associated with Noel were doing this, who knows.
We have done our best to get a balance of stopping this sort of thing, a previous poll to vote requiring an email address, but that reduced the votes to just over 300 responses, this poll had a IP restriction and we got over 1,500 responses.
At the end of the day the poll that counts will be on 8th October.
Watch out for next weeks poll when we will be asking which exiting Invercargill City Councillors re standing for election will get your vote. Our next mayoral poll will be after the 12th of August when nominations close and we will know all those standing.
