Is voting too easy?

Election Day was a month ago and we had to wait three weeks to get the results.

One of the frustrations over the delay is that the law which allows interim updates for provisional results on the night of the election, prohibits them from then until the final result is announced. That will be easy to change but it is not the only issue which needs to be addressed.

The wait for final results is a week longer in the past owing to a law change by Labour, with the support of New Zealand First and the Green Party, that allowed people to enrol right up to and on Election Day and also extended the time allowed for the final count by a week.

This made it easier to vote. Is it now too easy?

Polling places in shopping malls and other venues enabled many to vote without going out of their way.

Most of these were open for 12 days before the election and people overseas had five days more to download voting papers or go to an embassy.

More polling places and the ability to vote early was supposed to encourage more people to vote, but is that more important than the integrity of the election system and is it now too easy to vote?

Richard Prebble points out New Zealand is the only country that allows people to enrol on the day of the election :

There are reasons to doubt the result of the 2023 election. I say this having been a campaign organiser or candidate in 14 general elections, and also having been a UN official international election observer.

Countries ensure that only qualified electors vote by requiring voters to register before the election, giving their name, address and occupation. The electoral roll is published to enable public scrutiny.

My team would take the electoral roll door-to-door. We would find discrepancies and occasional electoral fraud. We found 18 people falsely enrolled at one address. It is the publishing of the roll that ensures the integrity of the election.

In 2020, the Jacinda Ardern-led Government enacted election-day enrolment. Now, on election day, with no proof of ID or address, anyone can sign a declaration, enrol, and vote. . . 

Despite having almost two weeks to vote, an extraordinary number of people go to the inconvenience of special voting in an electorate where they are not enrolled. The suspicion is that many have changed addresses, have not updated their enrolment, and are illegally voting in their old electorate. I know two electors who voted using their old address.

If you don’t know that elections  generally happen at three yearly intervals and take the many opportunities to enrol or update your enrolment, is allowing you to vote more important than the safeguard publishing the roll provides?

Then there is electorate tourism: people who enrol and vote in an electorate where they do not live.  . . 

Former Green MP Metiria Turei admitted she voted in an electorate where she didn’t live to help a friend. We can’t know how many other people vote where they are not eligible to do so.

People with more than one address don’t have a choice about where they vote. They must vote where they spend most of their time.

This was an issue when Wyatt Creech challenged the election night majority of Reg Boorman in the Wairarapa electorate. People who worked in Wellington for four or more days and returned to homes in Wairarapa had their votes disallowed because they ought to have enrolled in Wellington.

University students who move away to study often still vote in their home electorate even though they spend more time where they study.

Having represented two university electorates, I know electorate tourism occurs. Election-day enrolment has made electorate tourism easy.

Fear of electoral fraud is why electronic voting is not permitted, except for those voting from overseas. But if electronic voting is inherently unsafe, then there must be doubts over the electronic votes from overseas. . . 

There is no other country that lets people with no ID enrol and vote on election day. We are the only country where 20.9 per cent of the total votes cast are special votes.

No one knows how many of the 603,257 special votes are fraudulent.

The shift of a handful of votes could change the election result. The Green Party received one-third of their votes from specials, which boosted the number of Green MPs. The special votes decreased National’s MP count by two. Special votes enabled Te Pāti Māori to win two electorates. It is possible that if only valid ballots were counted, National and Act together won the election. . . 

Recounts don’t check the eligibility of voters or legitimacy of votes, only whether the count was correct.

It is vital that at least one electoral petition is filed with the High Court. The High Court can examine the validity of the ballots. Consideration also needs to be given to filing a High Court petition to challenge the party vote. A party vote challenge would be a mammoth task, but what is at stake is not just this election, but all future elections.

An electoral petition will help determine whether the present special voting arrangements are worth the cost of having a caretaker Government for a month or more.

We need to know whether election-day enrolment is empowering participation in democracy, or whether election-day enrolment is destroying the integrity of our elections.

There is another issue with special votes and that is the eligibility of people who live overseas.

Australians who live overseas must intend to return home in six years to be eligible to vote.

UK citizens who live abroad must have been enrolled at home within 15 years, or been too young to be registered when they left the UK.

New Zealand who live overseas need only need to have come home once in the two years before the election to be eligible to vote.

Is it right that people who have lived overseas for years, even decades, own no property and pay no tax in New Zealand are still eligible to vote when they won’t be here to live with the consequences?

That is a debate for another time.

The issue of whether it is now too easy to vote without any identification or verification of address, and to do it up to and on Election Day is more urgent.

Whether or not there is an electoral petition to test the eligibility of all voters, the question of whether last minute enrolments are undermining the integrity of our elections must be settled before the next one.