The government wants to restrict voting rights.
Same-day enrolment for elections are set to be scrapped, and the deadline for enrolment moved back to the day before advance voting begins, effectively reducing the number of people who can vote.
If you think this will only affect disorganised people (not that there is anything wrong with disorganised people, I’m one myself), think again.
Those returning from overseas, getting out of prison or becoming New Zealand residents during the voting window will be disenfranchised. In the last election, special votes included 97,000 people registering for the first time, and 134,000 who changed electoral districts before and during the voting period. In the next election, the government requires voters to enrol or update their details by midnight on the Sunday before advance voting starts on the Monday morning, 13 days before election day. If for any reason you can’t do that, you lose your right to vote.
Special votes, of course, tend to skew left. The government, sinking in the polls, needs to convince us that this is not a naked attempt to disenfranchise voters who don’t like them.
Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith has made the kind of feeble arguments which sound like they were rehearsed in front of a mirror at 3am.
Allowing late enrolments, while well intentioned, was… resource intensive, he insisted. “The final vote count used to take two weeks, last election it took three.”
Loud sighs could be heard coming from Goldsmith’s own ministry, who had warned him in their Regulatory Impact Statement that while the “impact on reducing special votes is uncertain, its impact on democratic participation could be significant.”
Even the government’s own Attorney-General thinks the restrictions are a dumb idea. Human-hot-knife-through-butter Judith Collins KC was blunt. The so-called ‘voting crackdown’ would breach human rights, she said.
“The accepted starting-point is the fundamental importance of the right to vote within a liberal democracy. A compelling justification is required to limit that right.”
Goldsmith’s excuses were many things. ‘Compelling’, in her view, wasn’t one of them.
The bits of the government which include PM Luxon and Goldsmith and exclude Collins and the entire ministry of justice aren’t backing down, although even the Attorney-General’s ridicule was nothing compared to the damage done to Goldsmith’s bluster by Act’s Don Quixote de la Mancha. Unable to contain himself, David Seymour told Stuff that the changes would only affect “dropkicks” who were, he insinuated, no loss to democracy.
If you turned 18 on election day 2023 or shifted house and hadn’t gotten around to registering your new address, congratulations, the deputy Prime Minister thinks you are a drop-kick.
Act’s justice spokesperson Todd Stephenson bought further clarity for anyone still gullible enough to take Goldsmith’s messaging at face value. In Hayden Donnell’s enjoyable analysis in The Spinoff, “Stephenson was sick of layabouts turning up at a polling booth and having the temerity to vote for parties other than Act. ‘Democracy works best when voters are informed, engaged, and take the process seriously. It’s outrageous that someone completely disengaged and lazy can rock up to the voting booth, get registered there and then, and then vote to tax other people’s money away.’”
And here was I thinking that the voting restrictions were about counting votes in two weeks instead of three.
Act, of course, don’t care what we think. They don’t even care what the rest of the government thinks. They care about getting on the telly. If there is discourse, they want to dominate it.
Donnell has written The Spinoff piece about the implications for National of this phenomenon, headlined ‘Nobody is cutting through government spin like the Act Party’. Seymour’s true talent, he explains, is for turning deliberately dull government flim flam into flaming media kryptonite.
When National threw out 33 fair pay claims for low-income women recently, Luxon insisted that it was purely to improve legislative “workability”, not to rescue Nicola Willis’s budget.
“More credulous observers may have been taken in by these assurances,” wrote Donnell. “Listening to National’s senior ministers, this wasn’t a case of low-income women paying for general tax cuts and interest write-offs for landlords; it was just a surprise effort to clear up some administrative issues under urgency with no public feedback, weeks out from an uncomfortably tight budget. Unfortunately for National, Seymour assured reporters [Brooke] van Velden had bailed National out of having to spend money on stuff like fair wages for childcare workers and hospice nurses. “I actually think that van Velden has … saved the budget for the government.”
I mean, we knew, but it was nice to have it confirmed.
Keeping Seymour and microphones apart is like trying to get superglue out of a woollen blanket. As a result, he is making National look, in Donnell’s assessment, like “an ideologically malleable major party being dog-walked into a series of financially iffy and increasingly politically disastrous moves by a coalition partner that won roughly a fifth of its vote.”
• Jenny Nicholls
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