Photo: RNZ / Nate McKinnon
The justice minister says changes to the electoral law will give New Zealanders certainty over who is leading their country. Critics say the changes are undemocratic and a breach of human rights.
Undemocratic and a breach of human rights. That is what most experts and officials think of the government's proposed changes to the electoral law.
Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith last week announced a suite of changes around who can vote and how they do so. Those include more opportunity for digital enrolment methods and introduce automatic enrolment updates. But the big one is the moving of the enrolment deadline.
At the last election, you could rock up on election day, enrol and cast your vote at the same time. But under this bill New Zealanders would have to enrol 13 days before election day to be eligible to vote.
Goldsmith says it is to ensure a final election result is achieved sooner, but he is being met with fierce critics, including from some within his own party, who think the change takes things a step too far.
While entities like the Ministry of Justice can - and do - offer advice in the form of policy papers and regulatory impact statements, electoral law expert Graeme Edgeler says the final decision falls on the shoulders of who New Zealanders have elected to represent them - the politicians.
"The government and the MPs are the ones that are elected, so they get to make the policy calls and argue for them and the opposition, if they want to, gets to argue against them," he says.
Edgeler says the Ministry of Justice had its own suggestions for reducing the number of special votes, for example, automatic enrolment updates.
"So if you tell MSD, 'here's my new address,' they'll tell the Electoral Commission, 'hey, this person has updated their address with us'; the Electoral Commission will see person's already enrolled ... and so your enrolment should be updated automatically now," he says.
The government took this suggestion on board, but Edgeler says stopping enrolment 13 days before election day takes things a step further.
Goldsmith told RNZ that people do not start coalition negotiations until they know the final outcome.
But while it might be a political preference to wait until the special votes are counted, Edgeler says there is nothing legally stopping politicians from starting negotiations as soon as election day finishes.
"The John Key-led National government, when it was first elected, it had its coalition negotiations complete and John Key was sworn in as prime minister before the special votes were announced," he says.
Edgeler says that is because the initial count on election night made the result clear, and he thinks that was the case with the last election as well.
"Prime Minister Chris Hipkins came out on election night and said, 'we've lost, we're not going to be the next government'," he says.
National, Act and NZ First could have started coalition negotiations that same day if they had wanted to, so Edgeler does not think special votes delaying coalition negotiations is a good enough reason to push the enrollment deadline out to 13 days.
Newsroom political editor Laura Walters confirms that waiting until the final result is announced before starting negotiations is the preference of some political leaders.
"Winston Peters, the New Zealand First leader, he doesn't like to actually start negotiations proper, if you will, until they have that final result back," she says.
Walters says Peters told her advanced enrollment also benefited political parties.
"He said if people don't enroll ahead of that voting period how do they know who they're campaigning to, who their message should be pushed towards," she says.
David Seymour was more blunt in his support of the change, saying only "dropkicks" enroll on election day.
But Walters says those "dropkicks" include quite a broad sector of society.
"What we do know from Electoral Commission data is that these people tend to be younger, we've also seen a higher proportion of Māori and Pasifika and Asian, but especially Māori," she says.
Walters adds renters and people who move around a lot and forget to update their enrollment details as people who might also be caught out by these changes.
Exactly how many people will be impacted by this change is unclear, but if last election is anything to go by, Walters expects the number of people impacted is in the hundreds of thousands.
"There were 450,000 people who registered or enrolled to vote during that advanced voting period and 110,000 people did that on election day," she says.
It is these figures which the Attorney General Judith Collins referenced in her report examining whether or not there was enough justified reason behind the changes to the election law.
She ruled that denying voters the political franchise is a "heavy price" to pay just to have the election result a week or two sooner.
Aside from the automatic enrollment update, Walters says reaction to the bill has been mostly negative.
"Essentially people are saying nothing should ever be done to suppress or reduce the number of people who are able to vote. Anyone who is eligible to vote, eligible to register to vote, should be given every opportunity to exercise that right.
"Is this worth it? Should the government and the Electoral Commission be bearing a little bit more administrative cost, a little bit more administrative burden, maybe waiting a little bit longer after the election to get the results, isn't that just the cost of democracy?"
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