ELECTION POLL: 1 week till the election!

[BlackPeter]

But probably not many of the students at Canterbury Uni are registered to vote in the Ilam electorate.

You realize that the UoC campus is in Ilam - and so are all the university halls?

Actually - any student living in Ilam (and that's not just the locals, but especially most of the non local students, who live e.g. in one of the many halls or in rented flats) has to register as voter in Ilam. You need to vote where you live (for more than one month).

from the 1993 electoral act:

Qualification of electors
(1)
Subject to the provisions of this Act, every adult person is qualified to be registered as an elector of an electoral district if—
(a)
that person is—
(i)
a New Zealand citizen; or
(ii)
a permanent resident of New Zealand; and
(b)
that person has at some time resided continuously in New Zealand for a period of not less than 1 year; and
(c)
that electoral district—
(i)
is the last in which that person has continuously resided for a period equalling or exceeding 1 month; or
(ii)
where that person has never resided continuously in any one electoral district for a period equalling or exceeding 1 month, is the electoral district in which that person resides or has last resided.

While I don't know which percentage of students are enrolled at all (from memory something like 60%, but these are old numbers) and how many of them do live in Ilam - I would assume the number goes well into the thousands (of a total of 22.700 uni students in Christchurch). Might well make the difference.