NZ's chief electoral officer on why counting the votes will still take so long - even with a law change

Sunday, 14 June 2026

The Electoral Commission is training voting place staff for an awkward conversation: telling tens of thousands of voters that half of their ballot won’t count.

And those will be easier than the ones where they tell people they are unable to vote at all.

A controversial new law passed since the last election means that voters will now have to be enrolled by October 25, two weeks before the election on November 7.

This is a huge shift from prior elections, when voters have been able to enrol all the way until the day, and is aimed at speeding up the count of “special votes” so that the country does not have to wait so long for a final count.

But as chief electoral officer Karl Le Quesne explained to the Sunday Star-Times in an extended interview - the count won’t be sped up at all in this election, with special votes still taking 20 days after the election, as they did in 2023.

Why counting will still take so long

The stated intent of the Government’s reform was to speed up the count by reducing the number of “special votes”.

“Special votes” are any vote where a voter votes outside of their regular electorate, or is enrolled after the “rolls” of voters are printed on “writ day” - this year October 4.

With late enrolment increasing in recent years the number of special votes have increased hugely - from about one in 10 in 2011 to one in five in 2023.

The Electoral Commission’s analysis suggests that these special votes - despite the law change - will continue to go up, with a forecast of around 700,000 special votes, or a quarter of all votes, should turnout match 2023.

Le Quesne said part of that projection was down to a trend towards people simply enrolling later, perhaps when they decided whether or not they would vote at all.

“The long-term trend we've seen is people updating their enrolments at the time they vote, or close to when they want to vote, and we think sometimes it's because they're not clear yet whether they want to vote or not. So they might leave it till quite late in the process,” Le Quesne said.

'The other thing is overseas votes — they're a really big part of it, and we're forecasting, based on past trends, that the number of overseas votes is going to increase as well, and they're all special votes…It's mostly Australia and UK, that's where most of them come from. But you'd be surprised the number of countries Kiwis are in that they vote from.'

He said the Commission would be going all out to try and get people to enrol by Writ Day (October 4) and thus not have to have a special vote, but he had to plan for many special votes anyway.

The incredibly paper-based counting system

More special votes means more time counting in part because counting votes is a strict legalistic process that mostly takes place on paper, with built-in integrity checks that take time.

First off - special votes taken in different electorates have to be mailed to the electorate they belong to.

“On the Sunday, you know, after election day, we package up all the special votes and send them off to the electorates they need to be counted in, so they have to get there for a start, pretty soon into that first week,” Le Quesne says.

And special votes from overseas have to be printed out if received digitally or physically mailed to New Zealand. The Electoral Commission must wait 10 days for these all to arrive.

While the special votes are repatriating all of the ordinary votes are counted again - by hand.

“We do a second count of the ordinary votes and that's where we apply our full range of integrity checks. It takes a few days to do that.”

This count involves multiple levels of scrutiny, both from a justice of the peace at each electorate, an electorate manager, and the national office of the Electoral Commission.

“Then what we have to do is what's called scrutinising the rolls, so all of those rolls and those two and a half thousand or so voting places have to be combined into one master of each electorate, and what we're doing is looking for people who may have voted more than once.”

Le Quesne said he’s hopeful that over time these integrity checks can be sped up and the time taken to count reduced - perhaps for election 2029 - and that he thinks a desire for a faster count is fair enough. Election 2029 will feature “automatic enrolment” updates for the first time which should substantially reduce the amount of special votes by automatically working out when people move and updating their enrolment accordingly.

“We're looking at the subsequent elections, what we can do to process those special votes much, much quicker. In fact, turn special votes — what are special votes now — into ordinary votes.

“A timely election result, and the integrity of that result, is absolutely critical to government formation, and we think it's a reasonable expectation.”

Yet he says they would need significantly fewer than 700,000 special votes this year to cut down the wait.

What will happen to those not properly enrolled?

Le Quesne says he will be doing everything he can to make sure everyone is enrolled not just in time to vote but before October 4.

There’s a community education grant for people who want to help boost turnout, high school visits to get the young enrolled, and a big advertising campaign planned. But the Commission is realistic about the message not getting through to everyone.

Its projections as of September last year were for about 55,000 votes totally disallowed for lack of enrolment - up from around 10,000 at the last election.

But a wider group of people - about 72,000 - are projected to have a “stale” enrolment that still lets half of their vote go through.

This will be people who are eligible to cast a party vote but have not updated their enrolment since moving, meaning they are no longer in the right electorate. The Commission are expecting this to come up quite often with people who turn up during advanced voting or on the day only to find they are not on the printed roll for that electorate.

Le Quesne says they are training staff to still take these votes so that the person’s party vote is still counted - as for this vote it is immaterial where you live.

“We’ll be outlining that to people in the voting place, if they’re not sure that they’ve enrolled or they’ve updated their address, or we can’t find them on our e-roll — we’ll let them know that the party vote would still count if they do vote.”

Does he want the local elections?

With turnout down dramatically in recent local elections, many have suggested that the Electoral Commission take over local body elections.

The agency currently looks after enrolment for these elections, but each council gets to run its own process - generally through the use of a private provider like Electionz or Election Services.

The Local Government Minister Simon Watts has been receptive to the calls and said he will seek advice on whether it can be done.

Le Quesne is cautious and says the Commission itself has not given a view yet, but he has talked to his counterparts overseas who run both local and national elections.

“I've spoken with other commissioners in other countries that run both state and local body elections. There's quite a bit to work through. You'd have to look at whether you would retain the postal voting system or have a mix of postal and in person. You'd have to look at the voting system, because it is quite different for local government compared to national elections. You'd have to look at the funding — who was going to pay for it, especially if there was a move to in-person voting.”

He appears sceptical of the Commission’s ability to increase turnout just by running these elections.

“It totally depends on what problem you’re trying to solve as well. If it’s turnout, and just changing providers, I’m not sure that’s going to address the turnout. You listen to people talk about why they don’t vote in local body elections — it’s not who the provider is, it’s a whole lot of other things.”