Local body elections in New Zealand are conducted by post. Ballot papers and accompanying information are mailed to electors, who have about three weeks in which to send their votes back by mail to returning officers. Postal elections were instituted to try to counter the low turnout in local body elections. It worked for a while, but by the 2000s the turnout in municipal and regional elections averaged less than 50% of registered voters. New Zealand Post business mail team leader Tony Cheshire is shown here with more than 109,000 local body election voting papers in the Dunedin mail sorting centre in 2004.