Voters in this year's Southland District Council elections will each receive their own unique ballot after councillors voted to randomise names printed on ballot papers.

The decision came at last week's council meeting and will mean each of the councillors' names will be in a random order on individual ballots, meaning no two voters ballot papers will be the same.

Previously councillors names were listed in alphabetical order, based on their surname.

Interim Policy Advisor Carrie Adams said having names in alphabetical order on the ballot paper made it difficult for those running who had surnames falling towards the bottom of the page as voters would often look at the top part of the ballot first without paying attention to the bottom section.

Mrs Adams said the argument in favour of the randomised order was that it makes voters read through each of their options more carefully from top to bottom and allowed them to make a "conscious choice of a particular candidate".

A third option was also presented to councillors, with the pseudo-random order option similar to the random order, but names chosen at random before ballots are printed by being drawn from a hat and then remaining in that randomised order on all of the ballot papers.

Determining the order of candidates on ballots is one of the pre-election tasks to be determined by each council in New Zealand under regulation 31 of the Local Authority Regulations 2001.

Council elections will be held on Saturday, October 12.