Plenty of voters in the 2010 elections chose not to make a choice on some, or in some cases any, of the local authorities they were charged with electing.
Health boards, in particular, received plenty of "blank" votes this year.
The final tally for the election showed 45,073 voting papers were returned.
In the election for the Dunedin mayoralty, and for councillors for the three city wards, there were 1296 blank votes and 779 "informal" votes .
This year's election attracted 317 special votes, where voters, for example, were overseas during the election.
Of those, 273 were valid.
Dunedin electoral officer Pam Jordan said informal votes were mostly situations where people mistakenly ticked boxes for single transferable voting (STV), when the boxes were meant to have been numbered.
"That's the majority," she said last night.
Other informal votes were situations where the voters' intentions were not clear.
In voting for the Otago constituency of the Southern District Health Board, there were 7059 blank votes.
Board chairman Errol Millar said this week the low number of properly filled-in papers for the heath board might be because health politics was not full of high-profile personalities and people often struggled to know who candidates were.
The health board list was also the last local authority on the voting papers.