The Electoral Commission has told staff to turn away voters who aren’t on the printed roll and who say they’re unenrolled, but has no plans to count how many people will be affected.
Changes made to electoral laws last year mean people must enrol to vote by October 25, the day before advance voting begins. In other words, where people could previously turn up to voting places and enrol and place a special vote on the same day, if you are unenrolled when you show up to vote you are out of luck.
Some voters may still lodge special votes, if they think they are enrolled or if they are unsure. The commission expects around 55,000 such votes will be disallowed this election, more than five times as many as in 2023. (In addition, it figures 72,000 electorate votes will be disallowed, because a voter has moved and not changed their enrolment prior to the start of advance voting.)
The number of disallowed votes is counted and publicly recorded when the final results of the election are released.
However, chief electoral officer Karl Le Quesne told Newsroom that others will simply be turned away, if they aren’t on the printed roll, don’t have an EasyVote card and say they’re not enrolled. The number of individuals turned away won’t be recorded.
“If someone says they are not enrolled, we will explain that, for their vote to count, they need to be enrolled before voting starts. We’ll give them a flyer with information on how to enrol for next time,” he said.
“We record if someone has voted, but we won’t be counting how many people come to a voting place but do not vote. We will ask questions in our post-election survey that will give an indication of those who tried to vote but couldn’t because they were not enrolled.”
If someone is not sure if they are enrolled, Le Quesne said staff could look them up using the electronic roll. If they are not listed there, he said, “we will explain that, for their vote to count, they need to be enrolled before voting starts. We will then say that, if they want to vote today, they will need to do a special vote that will take a bit longer. We will explain that whether their vote will count or not will depend on their enrolment, which will be checked after election day.”
“In all cases, we’ll be taking a cautious approach including asking follow-up questions if they cannot at first be found on the roll.”
He said the commission would undertake an extensive public education programme beginning August 10, urging people to enrol and making clear the rules are different this time.
University of Otago public law professor Andrew Geddis said election scrutineers might gather some data on the number of voters turned away, but they wouldn’t be at every polling place.
“The concern is that by making quite large-scale changes to voting practice, voters won’t change their behaviour quickly enough to be able to keep up with those changes, and you may have quite a number of people wanting to take part in the democratic process who find themselves unable to do so because of administrative changes made through the law,” he said.
“If those numbers are quite considerable and if we have a quite close election, then we do have this question as to whether the legitimacy of the election has been affected by people who wanted to take part being told that now the law no longer allows them to do so. So having a good understanding of the number of people affected by this administrative change might be important.”
Green Party co-leader Marama Davidson said the situation was “absolutely outrageous”.
“This Government’s blatant voter suppression is going to unfortunately end up in a lot of people not being able to vote. This Government is actively stopping people from voting,” she said.
“I met with the Electoral Commission and they seemed genuinely dedicated to [an] absolute mandate of encouraging people to participate in democracy. So I’m quite surprised at the response that they won’t be recording. I would have thought that, as part of their remit, that they want to understand why some people will be prevented from voting.”
Davidson said she suspected the Government had influenced the commission’s decisions “in some form”.
Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith denied that.
“This is an operational decision for the Electoral Commission to speak to. Outside of the legislation, I cannot interfere with how it runs elections logistically,” he said.
“Of course he’s saying that,” Davidson said, when presented with Goldsmith’s explanation, “but the fact of the matter is that were the commission being encouraged from the top to exhaust options to ensure they capture as many people’s right to engage as possible, they would be operating in a different manner.”
She called on the commission to revise its processes to encourage anyone who came to a voting place without an EasyVote card and who was not listed on the roll to lodge a special vote. In addition, she said the commission should formally record how many people were turned away without doing so.
“We cannot be absolutely certain of their enrolment status or not and so it is better to capture votes. Yes, some may be discounted, but still that then gives us a picture of how many people this Government is turning away from voting.”
Camilla Belich, justice spokesperson for the Labour Party, also said she was concerned by the commission’s plans not to record how many people were turned away.
“With the Government’s changes, one of our major objections has been we believe that in a democracy, we should be trying to increase the number of people who can participate and trying to increase the number of people who can vote,” she said.
“A way of ensuring more valid votes are cast would be to try and make sure that people cast a vote. And then, obviously, if there’s a technical reason that it can’t be counted, then if it has to be due to these new rules disallowed, then that’s better than not giving people the opportunity to vote at all.”
Such an approach might undermine one of the Government’s stated reasons for the change to enrolment requirements – an increasing number of special votes that takes longer to count.
Goldsmith said: “Late enrolments have placed too much strain on the system. The final vote count used to take two weeks; last election it took three. If we left things as they were, it would likely take even longer.”
“The Government has passed legislation which closes enrolment before advance voting begins. People will need to make sure they enrol or update their enrolment details by midnight on the Sunday, before advance voting opens on the Monday morning. This is a significant, but necessary change, and New Zealanders have plenty of time to get organised and enrolled.”
The Electoral Commission, for its part, has consistently said the changes will make no difference to the timeline in reporting the final result.
