New electoral restrictions risk real damage to our social fabric

Saturday, 25 July 2026

Henry Cooke is The Post’s political editor.

OPINION: It’s November 27.

The country has waited a long three weeks since election day for some clarity on who will lead the next Government. On election night the coalition parties held on - just - with 61 seats in a 120-seat Parliament. But the special vote is not yet counted, and given the special vote has taken two seats off National for the last three elections running, parties have wisely decided to wait out the counting before talking of Government formation.

But this time it is different. The chief electoral officer steps up to the podium and tells us that the election night results remain in place, save for a few close-run electorates swapping around.

He also announces some other statistics. Turnout was up: 2.9 million people voted. But under our brand new electoral law, where you have to be enrolled before advance voting starts, 55,000 voters turned up and had their vote “disallowed” due to not being enrolled, up from 11,000 the election prior.

Read more:

• An ‘election changing’ 55,000 votes could be barred under controversial new law

• New poll shows coalition victory - but Opportunity close to upending it all

• Getting rid of same-day election enrolment is a mistake

Slowly, people on social media start to do the maths and find 55,000 votes is worth two seats. If the left bloc had two more seats it would be in power.

It won’t matter, to the committed enough partisan, that we will have no way of knowing where those 55,000 disallowed votes might have gone. That they could have been mostly for NZ First or for parties well below 5%. It won’t matter that there were 11,000 disallowed votes in 2023 and nobody cared. It won’t matter that the changes were made legally by a democratically-elected Government, a long time before the election, and that parties had time to adjust their enrolment strategies. The election was stolen, the meme will go. The protests could be on a level New Zealand has not seen in decades.

This scenario might seem far-fetched, but it isn’t exactly implausible. The RNZ/Reid Research poll a few weeks ago suggested a 61-seat majority for the coalition. And the Electoral Commission itself is projecting for 55,000 disallowed votes - it was on a document submitted to the Justice Select Committee last year.

There are other scenarios that could cause instability too. The Electoral Commission projects even more voters - 72,000 - will have their party votes allowed but their electoral votes disqualified. Te Pāti Māori co-leader Rawiri Waititi said this week he was already challenging the result of the election because of issues with the Māori roll, and answered “what do you mean?” when asked if he would respect the result. How would he react if his party was locked out of Parliament by a few seats that very narrowly went for Labour?

To be fair, there are always people who refuse to accept election results. If the special votes do what they normally do and give two seats to the left, there will be ultras on the right who suggest on social media that the votes are stolen. People did it when Chloe Swarbrick won Auckland Central for the first time.

But the Government’s decision to brazenly change the law to bar enrolment during the advance voting period and on election day means such arguments will find far more support.

Much of the criticism has focused on Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith stopping people enrolling on election day. Critics make the natural point that it is reasonable for voters to turn up on election day, find out that they are not in fact enrolled, and fix that right away.

But this actually underplays the level of new restriction the Government has imposed. People have only been able to enrol to vote on election day for the last two elections. But as lawyer Graeme Edgeler has pointed out, there has been some provision for people to enrol the day before the election since at least 1948, with a wide right to do so since 1990. Banning new enrolments in the 12-day lead-up to the election, as the new law does, takes us back decades. For some idea of magnitude, around 230,000 voters enrolled on the day or in the lead-up at the last election. One assumes a majority of them will change their behaviour as a result of the changes.

Goldsmith’s stated reason for such a pullback of New Zealanders’ long-cherished right to do things at the last minute is that the number of “special votes” has climbed too high, making counting the vote slower and slower. All late enrolments are special votes, so the logic goes that by cutting off a source of a lot more late enrolments, more people will enrol normally and cast the “ordinary” votes that get counted on election night.

He is right that the number of special votes has increased exponentially, and that the enrolment changes will have driven that. Waiting weeks and weeks and weeks for an election result is not ideal and can cause conspiracy theories in itself.

The Electoral Commission, which pointedly did not advise him to make this change, has frustrated his ability to sell this message by confirming this year that the count would be no faster than it was in 2023, given it still expects a huge number of special votes. This has left Goldsmith retreating to the notion that his change will stop the count taking even longer in years to come.

This argument may have more merit had Goldsmith acted a bit more cautiously. The Electoral Commission is pushing “automatic enrolment” not this election but next, which should make updating the roll far more simple. Why not wait until that election for the new law to come into force? Or indeed, why not simply take New Zealand back to the status quo of 2017, when you could enrol the day before the election but not on the actual election day?

Defenders of the law change will note that New Zealand is relatively permissive on enrolments relative to other countries. They are right. Voting in other countries sucks.

Americans often find themselves waiting in line after work - elections are always on Tuesdays - for the chance to have their voices heard. Brits are given one specific voting place they must use. In Japan voters have to hand-write their preferred candidate from memory.

New Zealand, to its great credit, makes voting far easier than this. You can vote from anywhere in the country. You could (until now) sort your enrolment at the last minute. You can quite easily vote from overseas. You don’t have to speak English or produce an ID or own property - you get to vote by virtue of living in this country and thus having a stake in it. This is a civic virtue that ought to be celebrated, not curtailed.

Adding friction to that process has an appeal to some who say voting is a “responsibility” as much as it is a right. Such arguments might make sense in the abstract, but in reality adding in barriers to voting typically disenfranchises the most vulnerable in our society, the ones who don’t have time between their two jobs to check their enrolment or are too distracted by addiction issues to realise there is an election on until the last minute. Once you decide these people do not “deserve” the vote you have opened the door to ending the rightly cherished principle of one person, one vote. After all, if a lazy person doesn’t deserve the vote, does your mother with Alzheimer's?

Our country has largely escaped the partisan rancour that impacts other electoral systems. After a series of under-handed moves throughout the early 20th century, National and Labour got in a room together and created the Electoral Act 1956, which both sets the lengths of Parliamentary terms and “entrenches” this length, a novel constitutional step that somewhat binds future Parliaments against making changes without either a super-majority in the House or a referendum. Entrenchment is technically a bit of a fiction - the entrenchment itself could be voted away with a simple majority - but it has been respected in the decades since for a reason. The other big change to the way we do elections - the move to MMP - was made by referendums and through options designed by a bipartisan select committee based on an independent Royal Commission.

That Goldsmith did not win Labour’s cooperation for his changes should have given him more pause. Goldsmith argues that Labour did not win National’s approval to expand enrolment to election day - which is true, but does not absolve him of anything. Bad behaviour by one side does not excuse it of the other - and expanding enrolment and restricting it are very different things. Restricting it in such a partisan manner puts the enduring civility of our public life at some risk.