A request to Anthony Morton the electoral officer for the Dunedin City Council elections

Regarding the unlikelihood of the allocations to Sophie Barker

11 October 2025: Sophie Barker has apparently won the Dunedin Mayoralty race. I doubt that the counts are valid. I will have more to say on this. Here is my post on her votes from 2022.

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-It seems that the election is not over.

As per my post yesterday I found the fact that 5 out of the 9 allocations to Sophie Barker ended in zero to be an ‘anomaly’. The first of these is from progress to preliminary count and then the other four are from preferences of the voters allocated when other candidates dropped out. As you can see her total allocations also ends in a zero. You will also note that none of the other candidates allocations ending in zero numbered more than one which is exactly how you would expect it to be, there being 10 possibilities each time.

The allocations ending in zero are highlighted in orange.

The chances of that happening are here i.e.

….So out of a total possible 10^9 outcomes, 8,909,200 will have 5 or more matching digits. That’s a probability of 0.0089092.

In other words less than a 1% possibility. I have therefore sent the following to the Electoral Officer Anthony Morton.

Hi Anthony,

as you are the electoral officer for the Dunedin Council elections I am sending this to you.

The chances of 5 of the 9 allocations to Sophie ending in zero is less than 1%. I have attached a PNG image of this, all the allocations ending in zero are highlighted in orange. As you can see no other candidate has more than one of such an allocation (ending in zero). 

The first allocation is from her total count from progress to preliminary. The other four are votes that were allocated to her when other candidates dropped out. The chances of this happening, five of those numbers ending in a zero, is less than 1% (0.0089).

As you can see her final count of total allocations also ends in a zero. A further oddity and also exceptionally unlikely.

To my eyes it puts the whole Mayoral count at question with the ranking of candidates, especially Sophie Barker, very much at question. You should not be confirming the vote as verified until you have investigated this.

Please pass on to me the results of your investigation.

I have also requested via the LGOIMA from Clare Sullivan answers to the following;

• where the counting of the ballots is done, an address please.

• where I can find details of the algorithms currently used, please provide the actual algorithms (there are two at least, one for Council elections and one for Mayoral elections)

As they are simple requests maybe you could confirm for me the answers to them and I can withdraw my LGOIMA request to Clare.

Yours Sincerely

Richard Seager

Unfortunately he is an employee of the company that counts the votes. But nevertheless he is at least now on notice.

Will this make me Mayor? Extremely unlikely. But it will probably change the order of results. And if they take no notice of it the likelihood of it ending up in the District Court is high. So they should definitely take notice of it.

I am currently ‘deboosted’ on Twitter but have sent this post there as well anyway.

#dcc #dunedin #elections #electionz #otepoti #dunedinmayor #radich #vandervis #simms