He mea nui ki a mātou tō matataputanga.
Your privacy is important to us.
PRIVACY POLICY
We may collect personal information from you, including information about your:
- name;
- contact information;
- eligibility to participate in an election or voting process;
- computer or network;
- billing or purchase information;
- IP address if you are voting online;
- feedback or any concerns if you want to get in contact with us about our services.
We collect your personal information in order to:
- provide election services to our clients and their electors/voters and to receive nominations;
- confirm the eligibility of nominees to stand as candidates;
- communicate with our clients and their representatives; and
- ensure we hold the correct client and billing information.
Besides our staff, we share this information with:
- organisations when we need to send any notices, information or voting credentials by email in order to enable electors to participate in an election or poll;
- the Electoral Commission in order to check whether a person is on the parliamentary electoral roll when carrying out local government elections and when we need to check the validity of a special vote and we cannot confirm the person is on the published parliamentary roll;
- our printers and mailhouses in order to prepare electoral rolls and voting mailers;
- our clients in order to confirm the eligibility of a person to vote if that person's information was not supplied by the client; and
- third party contractors who work on special projects with us to develop software and products for us if that information is also in the public domain (such as information on parliamentary rolls or in public nomination forms).
We only use your personal information for the purpose of administering, evaluating and improving our services, including our online services, and communicating with you. We do not share your personal information with anyone other than is necessary to carry out the election or voting process or when we have a third party contractor working with us to identify improved solutions for an aspect of the election process.
Providing some information to us is optional. If someone chooses not to provide a name and contact details and the information necessary to confirm the person’s eligibility to be nominated to stand as a candidate or to be a nominator, we’ll be unable to process the nomination. If someone chooses not to provide a name and contact details and information necessary to confirm the person’s eligibility to vote, we’ll be unable to provide voting documents to the person.
We keep your information safe on our own servers which are protected by firewalls and modern encryption standards. Information is backed up regularly, and backups are encrypted. Access to the personal information we store is limited to staff who have a legitimate business requirement to use it.
We keep your information for only as long as required by the client for a reasonable period following the outcome of the election (in case there is any challenge to the election), and in accordance with any requirements of our clients. After this time, we destroy it by erasing all digital data and secure disposal of any printed information.
For local government elections, we are required to provide voting documents, special voting documents and declarations, disallowed special voting documents, Final Electoral Rolls, Election Certificates, and late voting documents to the District Court of the territory or district in which the election was conducted. The court is required to keep the material secure until it is destroyed. Destruction occurs either once 21 days has elapsed from the date of the public notice declaring the result of the election or poll or, in a case where an application is made for a recount or an inquiry or a petition demanding an inquiry is filed, until the completion of the recount or inquiry.
We may collect statistical information about your visit to our website to help us improve the site. This information is aggregated and does not identify you personally. It includes:
- Your IP address;
- The pages you accessed on our site and links you clicked on;
- The date and time you visited the site;
- The referring site (if any) through which you clicked through to this site;
- Your operating system;
- The type of web browser you use;
- Other things like your screen resolution and the language setting of your browser.
You have the right to ask for a copy of any personal information we hold about you, and to ask for it to be corrected if you think it is wrong. If you’d like to ask for a copy of your information, or to have it corrected, please contact us at privacy@electionservices.co.nz, or 09 9735212, or PO Box 5135, Wellesley Street, Auckland 1141.
