A last-minute voting surge shows we need to hold a proper election day, and most importantly, call in the orange guy. 

Voter turnout in this year’s local elections was, to put it euphemistically, absolutely shithouse. It’s expected to top out around 40% nationally, though that figure is being inflated by democracy-loving rural voters and Wellingtonians showing up en masse to deny Ray Chung his $90,000 victory Rolex. Depending on how many special votes there are, Auckland’s figures might not crack 30%. We’ll find out on Friday.

The numbers are grim, and more so when you look at the long-term trend. Our turnout stats have now been trending down for more than three decades. Overall, this year’s turnout will likely be similar or slightly lower than in 2022, which was also dire, just as it was in 2019, 2016, 2013, and 2007. 

(Not you 2010. You’re OK.)

But amid the weekend’s democratic gloom were signs of hope. Despite local elections not actually having an official polling day, huge numbers of people turned up to libraries and community centres to cast their ballots in the final hours before voting closed. More than 68,000 voted before midday Saturday in Auckland. Nearly 20,000 did in Wellington. More than 11,000 people – 12% of total voters – voted at the same time in Dunedin and more than 8,000 did the same in Hamilton, pushing up the overall turnout numbers.

The Saturday voting spike in Wellington raised 2025 turnout above that of the previous three elections.

Penny Hulse, who took part in a local government review commissioned in 2021, sees the last-minute democratic rush as evidence of the potential benefits of running local elections like national ones, where turnout regularly hits 80%. She wants to replace postal voting with a mix of early voting and an in-person polling day where people can turn up to community centres to cast their ballot. “The queues outside the libraries on Saturday said it all, didn’t they? We can’t do worse than 25% turnout, so getting a bit of excitement going with a voting day could help.”

North Shore councillor Richard Hills agrees. He tried to get Auckland Council to fund a polling day this term, but was shot down by a slim majority of his colleagues, including mayor Wayne Brown and deputy Desley Simpson. “Lots of people told me they assumed there were voting booths and election day was the day to vote,” he says. “Forcing people to vote by mail in 2025 is like telling people they can only access Taylor Swift’s new album on cassette: a few of the really keen people will find a way to do it, but the rest probably will wonder why bother.”

Even with a polling day, local government probably isn’t going to generate the same buzz as a new Taylor Swift album. It might need some extra help to get people interested. Enter the orange guy. The citrus golem’s immense psychic aura undergirds our national elections. Because of him, everyone knows orange is the colour of democracy. His ever-grinning face is the sign that you need to vote in the next few weeks or be afflicted with unimaginable horrors.

But the orange guy belongs to the Electoral Commission. It runs our central government elections. Local elections are primarily run by two private companies, Electionnz and Election Services. Both have their flaws. In 2022 and 2019, people turned up to Election Services’ one-stop voting shops, only to find they’d run out of voting papers. This year, both organisations mistakenly left blurbs for Māori ward candidates out of their voter booklets.

It couldn’t hurt to hand over their responsibilities to the orange demon who’s spearheaded decades of successful elections. There seems to be bipartisan support for the move. Local Government NZ is on board. At the C&R afterparty in Auckland on Saturday, candidates and campaign managers were backing it as well.

Unfortunately it seems like the prime minister isn’t as enthusiastic. In his interview with Mike Hosking on Monday, Christopher Luxon acknowledged the elections were, in the host’s words, an “unmitigated disaster”. The prime minister posited a few explanations for the low turnout. Uninspiring candidates. Lack of voter enthusiasm. But then, when it came to the actual voting system, he launched into a defence. “The upshot is we’ve got a system, it works, you’ve just got to do it.”

Sure, and Suzanne Paul’s cursed Māori village would have been a success if anyone had shown up. I would have got the winking eye of Auckland’s giant Santa into Te Papa if its curators hadn’t kept saying no. It’s true our local election voting system would work if people actually used it to vote, but the truth is they haven’t for years, and it’s unlikely they’ll start any time soon. As Einstein famously said, the definition of insanity is doing the same local election over and over again and expecting different results. We owe it to the orange guy, his dog, and to a lesser extent the nation’s voters, to hand over the reins and finally change up a failing system for the first time in decades.