Andrew Geddis on the new enrolment deadlines, who is most affected, and whether the justifications stack up.
Imagine, said Andrew Geddis, “if the IRD came out with a rule that said if a small business has not filed its GST return on a particular day … that small business cannot carry out any business in the future”. After all, “they’re dropkicks. They can’t be trusted to run businesses if they miss one deadline.”
The public law expert was not branching out into tax law, but responding to a question about the removal of the option to enrol and vote during advance voting or on polling day itself, and remarks by David Seymour, the leader of the Act Party and deputy prime minister, who said of the changes: “Frankly, I’m a bit sick of dropkicks that can’t get themselves organised to follow the law.”
The “dropkick” exclusion sounded like “a throwback to how we used to see voting”, said Geddis, professor at the University of Otago, speaking in an episode of At Large with Toby Manhire.
“Back when New Zealand first introduced voting, we had a property requirement – you had to have the right amount of property to be allowed to vote, because only people with the right amount of property really had the ‘right qualities’ to be allowed to vote. We moved away from that at the end of the 19th century on the basis that, if you’re in New Zealand and you’re affected by the government, then you should be able to have your say on how that government is going to govern,” he said.
“This seems to almost be a retrenchment, going back to the 1850s or 1860s, saying: there’s two classes of people in New Zealand – there’s the good class, who are careful and methodical and take care of everything and make sure their paperwork is in order. They ought to have the right to vote. Then there’s the others. We shouldn’t let them vote because we can’t trust them; they don’t know what they want.”
The changes have been justified by the justice minister, Paul Goldsmith (who regarded Seymour’s 2025 comments as “unhelpful”), as addressing a rise in late enrolments, which, “however well intentioned, places too much strain on the system”, generating longer waits until the final vote comes in and testing the required 20-day timeframe.
That concern was, in Geddis’s view, what had “put the issue on the agenda” and driven the changes. But it didn’t hurt that the evidence suggested votes for National and its allies would be less severely impacted.
“I suspect that Paul Goldsmith and his coalition colleagues looked at a policy proposal, which is to stop people being able to enrol and vote on the same day, and thought, that will help achieve what we really want, and it’ll have the added benefit of stopping a whole lot of people voting who are our natural opponents,” said Geddis.
“So I don’t think that was the prime cause for the change, but I think it certainly was a reason to go to what I call the ‘nuclear option’ more quickly than they otherwise might have done.”
Chris Hipkins, the leader of the Labour Party, has raised fresh concerns in recent days about the changes, arguing that “if tens of thousands of people go to cast their votes and have their votes disqualified, it will be an indictment on the track record of this government”, and suggesting the Electoral Commission had failed to adequately communicate the changes.
Labour and others had come to that view based on what they found out door-knocking, where they were consistently alerting people to the changes, said Geddis. “I think what these parties are saying is, we’re doing all this work and we don’t see anything coming from the Electoral Commission to back up our efforts. It’s true that the advertising that seems to be occurring at the moment is primarily advertising around the Māori electoral option, because we’re coming up to the date by which Māori voters must choose whether or not to be on the general or Māori roll. That has a deadline of August 6,” he noted.
“So it’s possible that the Electoral Commission is prioritising that issue … before they kick into their general ‘make sure you’re enrolled to vote’ advertising. But … we’re 100 days out, which means we’re actually 87 days out from when people must be enrolled to vote. You’d want to see that advertising kicking in, you know, very soon.”
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