Ele Ludemann: Voting too easy

Voting in New Zealand is easy – maybe too easy.

If you’re 18, a citizen who lives here, or has been in the country in the last three years, or a permanent resident and have lived here continuously for 12 months or more.

If you meet that criteria you can enrol to vote even if you’re on remand, home detention, serving a community-based sentence, or serving a sentence of imprisonment of less than 3 years in a New Zealand prison.

It’s not compulsory to enrol to vote but you must be enrolled to vote.

In most countries people have to enrol before polling day. In 2020 and last year people were able to enrol on election day and the Auditor General found that caused problems.

The right to vote is a fundamental plank of democracy. It’s a right that is often taking lightly and the ability to enrol on election day contributes to that.

That could change:

Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith says very few countries allow voters to enrol on election day, and New Zealand should consider changing the rules.

A report by the auditor-general released on Tuesday found an unprecedented number of special votes were cast in last year’s general election, leading to rushed final checks and mistakes. . .

Paul Goldsmith, the current justice minister, was keeping an open mind.

“There’s some basic, basic stuff that the auditor-general pointed out, so we’re obviously concerned about that, and I will be making my expectations absolutely clear to the Electoral Commission around performance. So that’s absolutely the case,” he told Morning Report.

“The broader question though is whether the design of the system, particularly with the same-day enrolments – enrolments on election day, which is … a new idea – is adding much more pressure to the system.

“And remember that they used to be out of count everything in two weeks. This time, they were in a mad rush to count it in three weeks. We were waiting and waiting and waiting and still mistakes were made. And so that’s the issue.”

Goldsmith said it already cost $227 million to run an election.

“Rather than, you know, just throw even more hundreds of millions at the problem, wouldn’t it be more sensible to ask, have we overcomplicated? Have we made it too, too complicated? Can we simplify it in some way?” . .

It’s not hard to enrol – it can be done online or phoning to have an enrolment form posted to you ; or at polling booths once advance voting starts.

Requiring people to enrol before voting day would simplify the election process. More than 100,000 people enrolled to vote on the day last year which necessitated them making special votes.

If enrolments closed sooner it would reduce the number of special votes by 10s of thousands.

That would speed up the vote count and also improve the integrity of the voting system.

It might also make people realise that the right to vote comes with the responsibility to put at least a little thought into doing so.

Making voting too hard would undermine democracy, but enabling it to be too easy with the ability to enrol on election day makes it too easy.

Ele Ludemann is a North Otago farmer and journalist, who blogs HERE - where this article was sourced.