The government does not want to spend the time and resources to fully modernise the law and processes surrounding our electoral rolls – so who are the real dropkicks in this story?
Justice minister Paul Goldsmith yesterday unveiled the government’s proposals to change electoral law in time for the 2026 election through an Electoral Amendment Bill introduced into the House.
Some of these changes, such as once again removing the right to vote from all sentenced prisoners while they remain behind bars, had already been announced. I’ve had my say on this particular issue already and won’t bore you with it again. Let’s just say I’m not supportive of what the government wants to do here.
The big, and quite unexpected, announcement was that anyone not enrolled to vote once advance voting starts (a period that will be set in law as beginning 12 days before polling day) will no longer be able to cast a vote at all. And people who are enrolled, but are enrolled in the wrong electorate, will only be able to cast a party vote. This proposed prohibition on enrolling and voting on the same day is necessary, Goldsmith claimed, to prevent the vote-counting process from blowing out past the current 20-day timeframe and so enable a speedy declaration of final election results.
What the problem is, and why this proposed solution is so radical in the New Zealand context, requires a bit of unpacking. So stick with me as we take a quick tour through how voter enrolment and vote processing works in our system.
Let’s start with if you have correctly enrolled to vote (i.e. at the place where you reside in terms of electoral rules) before the printed electoral rolls are produced for the election. In this case you simply rock up to any polling station in your electorate, have your name physically crossed off the printed electoral roll, and get given an “ordinary” ballot. You then mark this and put it in the ballot box, before walking away full of self-satisfaction at having completed your civic duty.
However, if for some reason your name is not on the printed electoral roll for the electorate you are voting in, then you will have to cast a “special” vote. This may be for a whole bunch of reasons. Somehow your name may have been left off the printed electoral roll, despite your being correctly enrolled. You may be voting outside the electorate you correctly are enrolled in because you are travelling for business, or are attending university in another city, or similar. Your name may be on the “unpublished” electoral roll because of personal safety fears. You may have enrolled to vote after the printed roll was produced (but before voting begins). You may be enrolled but have moved residence and forgotten to update your enrolment details. Or, you may not actually be enrolled to vote at all when you turn up at the polling place.
In any of these cases, you first have to fill out a “special vote declaration” before receiving and casting a ballot. These special votes and declarations get set aside and only are counted after the declaration has been processed by electoral officials. If a voter was enrolled but subsequently has changed their residence, then their declaration is used to update their enrolment to their new electorate (thereby allowing their electorate vote to count). And if a voter was not enrolled at all, their declaration is used to enrol them (thereby allowing both their electorate and party votes to count).
Processing special votes is much more time-consuming than is the case for counting and checking ordinary votes – it takes something like 10 times longer, according to the Electoral Commission. And the number of special votes has increased a lot; in 2023, some 602,000 votes cast were special votes, or about 20.9% of all votes. The increase means that more time is required post-election before a final election result (which includes special vote totals) can be announced.
It is this pushing out of the final result that has Goldsmith so upset. And, to be fair, it is a real potential problem (one that can be expected to get worse over time if nothing is done). Which is why the Electoral Commission and Ministry of Justice officials suggested a range of changes to law and practice in response. Some of these suggestions – allowing for automatic updating of a voter’s enrolment details using government data, etc – have been included in the bill. That’s a good thing, which can in itself be expected to ease the numbers of people having to cast special votes in the future.
However, the government also has chosen to do something that no one involved in electoral law policy advised – removed the ability for “same day” enrolment and voting. I’ll explain why this is just a bad thing to do in itself, before moving on to speculate on why it might not even be that effective at achieving what the government says it wants.
In terms of why this is bad policy, we need to understand the general principle on which New Zealand elections operate. Voting generally is considered to be “A Good Thing” which ought to be made as easy and accessible as possible. So, we continue to provide a huge number of polling places across the country (including in rural areas where only a handful of votes result). We allow people to cast their votes at any polling place anywhere in the country for pretty much any reason (even if this results in their casting a special vote). We do not have any voter ID rules in place, relying instead on after-the-fact roll checks to pick up any double-voting issues. And we always have allowed people to enrol and vote on the same day right up to the day before election day itself (with this approach then extended to election day itself in 2020).
Therefore, on its face an approach that says “unless your enrolment details are correct some 13 days before election day, you won’t get to vote” flies in the face of our electoral traditions. And the consequences of the change are all too predictable. As noted by officials during the bill’s development, some 300,000 to 350,000 special votes in 2023 were cast because the voter had either failed to update their enrolment details or were not enrolled at all. Those voters are most likely to be younger, and come from areas with high Māori, Asian and Pacific communities.
In other words, they are what David Seymour thinks of as “dropkicks” – people apparently so unworthy of our respect that we should have no qualms about locking them out of the democratic process. The fact that this cohort is more likely to vote for left-of-centre parties (which invariably increase their share of the vote after special votes are counted) no doubt colours this assessment. Meaning that we have a right-of-centre coalition government championing a law change that was not recommended to them as a solution, which goes against the traditional grain of our electoral laws, and which will predominantly disenfranchise individuals prone to supporting their political opponents. It is a good thing I am not conspiratorially minded otherwise some grim conclusions might be drawn.
Furthermore, it is not entirely obvious that Goldsmith’s proposed changes will be effective in solving the underlying problem of delayed election results. We might start by noting that while his announcement of the changes complained that “[t]he final vote count used to take two weeks, last election it took three”, the accompanying bill will not change this timetable. So, apparently the government is at least resignedly accepting of a 20-day wait for final election results.
Whether that 20-day timeframe can accommodate the necessary vote processing and counting, even with the government’s proposed changes, is still questionable. Because the government is not removing the general availability of special votes. Voters can still cast these if they are outside their electorate, or enrol after the printed roll is produced (but before voting begins), or are on the unpublished roll, and so on. The government instead is removing the right to enrol, or change enrolment details, after voting begins. And because being correctly enrolled is a precondition to casting a valid vote, this therefore will work to invalidate the special vote of someone who is not enrolled after it has been cast.
What this means in practice is that anyone not enrolled when voting begins can still wander into a polling place, fill out a special vote declaration, receive a ballot paper and cast what they think is a vote. Electoral officials will then still need to process the declaration in order to work out that the individual isn’t actually enrolled to vote anywhere. Only then will the vote be discarded from the vote count – all that changes is that the electoral roll is not updated to include their details (so their vote remains in the count).
Equally, if you are enrolled but have changed residence without updating your details you can fill out a special vote declaration and cast a vote. The electoral officials will then process your declaration in order to work out that although you have enrolled to vote (and so can cast a party vote), you did so in the wrong electorate (so they cannot count your electorate vote). Again, this may save some time, or it may just create more complexity.
Of course, what the government says it wants is for people to correctly enrol in their proper electorate before voting starts so that they can cast an ordinary vote. And I have no doubt that there will be a huge push by both the Electoral Commission and political parties of the left (plus affiliated civil-society groups) to get this message out. Which may in and of itself ameliorate the worst possible impacts of this proposed law change.
But people are, by-and-large, not reliably rational actors. The intricacies of electoral law and the technical requirements to participate are not something that sit at the minds of many (probably most) individuals. In fact, the only time many (probably most) concern themselves with elections is when they really need to – at the point they make their way to the polling place to take part in choosing who will govern the country for the next three years.
The government’s proposed law change risks cancelling the efforts of some thousands, or even tens-of-thousands, of people who have shown a willingness to engage in that practice. It does so because the government does not want to spend the time and resources to fully modernise the law and processes surrounding our electoral rolls. And it reverses a long-standing approach to how our electoral system should operate. It really makes you wonder who are the real dropkicks in this story?
