Southern District Health Board election statistics issued by the Ministry of Health this week have been revised following the discovery that more than 6000 Southland informal and blank votes were not included.
Ministry of Health manager of governance and Crown entities David Pannett said the data file from Gore and Invercargill used to calculate the national figures had not included these votes, but this had not been realised when the totals were compiled.
While all valid votes had been included, only the blanks and informal votes from the Queenstown area had been tallied in the totals in the tables released to the Otago Daily Times this week.
The additional information means Southland's total voter turnout rose to 41,979.
Instead of being below the national average turnout (now 48.6%,), Southlanders were above it on 53.9%.
The overall voting for the Southern board, which is the only board to have two constituencies, rose almost 3% to 54.1% once the figures were corrected.
Mr Pannett said the change also meant that instead of Southland constituency having the highest percentage of valid votes, it recorded second lowest on 79.4%.
Informal votes, which had been high in 2007, remained high on 8% in Southland, allowing Otago voters to retain their 2007 record for returning the lowest proportion of invalid votes (2.2%).
The number of blank votes totalled 5312, pushing the percentage of blanks to 12.7%, fourth in the country, but well behind the Auckland District Health Board, which had the top percentage on 17.3%.
The average for blank votes over the whole of the country was 10.4%.
