The Government wants to cheat the next election result
The Government wants to cheat the next election result
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8:00 am, September 28th, 2025 - 24 comments
Categories: Christopher Luxon, election 2026, elections, electoral commission, electoral systems, human rights, making shit up, spin, you couldn't make this shit up -
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National is forging ahead with its intent to skewer the electoral system in its favour. The Electoral Amendment Bill is currently being considered by Parliament’s Justice Select Committee.
Christopher Luxon has stuck to his previous talking points and claimed that the intent is to speed up the counting of votes so that a future Government can be decided on more quickly. He is clearly not backing down.
He believes that the mass disenfranchisement of likely Labour and Green voters is justified so that the result can be determined more quickly. According to Luxon:
“We expect [the proposed changes] to speed up the voting – pretty simple. We’re living in 2025 and I just suggest that that vote can be counted a hell of a lot faster than what we’ve experienced in New Zealand”.
“Go look at other Western economies around the world and how fast they count their vote. We must be the slowest folk on the planet.”
But there is a problem for Luxon. And it is more than a minor one. The proposed changes will not speed up the count.
From Lillian Hanley at Radio New Zealand:
Chief electoral officer Karl Le Quesne explained to the committee on Thursday the post-election process, part of which was about determining who was eligible to vote and what votes can be counted.
He was asked by [Labour MP Duncan Webb] how many days sooner the official results would be available based on the changes proposed.
“Based on the forecast we’ve done in the changes that are proposed, we don’t think we can deliver it sooner than 20 days.”
To clarify, Webb asked, “There will be no difference?”
Le Quesne responded “no” because people who update their enrolment after writ day and before the 13-day close-off will still have to do a special vote.
“That’s because we’re forecasting that there’ll still be around 700,000 special votes, we’ve got to run through all these integrity checks.”
Webb asked why the changes were being made at all. and Le Quesne said, “This is not a change that we recommended.”
Le Quesne explained if the changes were not made, the Commission would still aim to get all the enrolments processed by the fourth day after the roll closed.
“We would just have to resource up in a much bigger scale than otherwise.”
So much for Luxon wanting the Electoral Commission to do “everything they can to move heaven and earth to count the vote in New Zealand very, very quickly”. They could let everyone vote as long as they applied enough resources so the special votes could be processed quickly.
This is important. The Electoral Commission believes that 55,000 voters could be disenfranchised by this law change. And the changes will not speed up the count.
As I said previously the proposal has shades of Donald Trump about it.
In 2020 he famously wanted to stop the count of votes as a late surge effectively removed him from office. And Republican attacks on the right to vote are numerous including a sustained attack on same day voter registration.
If you want to maximise the number of people voting then same day enrolments are a no brainer. If you want to skewer things away from the poor and the young then you will remove it. Given that the poor and the young tend to vote left the intent behind this proposal is pretty clear.
Last election after the counting of special votes National lost two seats, Te Pati Maori picked up two and the Greens picked up one. This proposed change could be worth a couple of seats. And that may be enough to get National back over the line.
Shame on them. Absolute shame on them.
They have no shame mickey as they sell NZ down their polluted river.
Would this not count as a constitutional change requiring 75% support? I know that with a workaround of the Constitution Act this can be passed with only 50%, but that is a dodge that should only be used in exceptional circumstances, which hardly apply in this particular case.
Le Quesne, a brave man to call out their self interest. We must mobilise the vote by explaining CoC are 'taking it away', and motivate all to enrol and vote early if this change proceeds.
Doesn't count as an entrenched constitutional change. On the other hand, that makes it easier to change it back to the current system when this evil government is booted out.
In this day and age, there is no reason why people shouldn’t be able to enrol to vote on election day. We live in a 24/7 world, the ability to enrol to vote on election day, like advance voting, allows for flexibility, and TBH suits our more casual but busy lives.
Because when you're at the bottom of the heap and struggling to survive day to day, politics and whether or not you're on the electoral role doesn't register. Many of those people aren't going to be voting, whatever the deadlines are. But there's still a group that it would register for, when it's impossible to escape that there's an election happening, and they have every right to enrol last minute if that's the decision they want to make.
I though the aim of the exercise in a democracy was to make sure as many as possible have the opportunity to participate in the process, not just the "right" sort of people.
Yeah you’re absolutely right.
I can understand some people saying we should all be enrolled and it’s personal responsibility. I grew up in the 70’s and 80’s. We generally worked Monday to Friday, weekends and public holidays off, so perhaps we all had more time to organise ourselves. Times change and we should allow for that
And "Special Votes" are special for a reason. Last Election, my partner and I voted in London on the 12th of October. Those votes needed to be posted back to New Zealand. They probably got back before we did.
I have done enough Election Day scrutineering to know that there are a lot of people who turn up on Election Day to vote and find that for various reasons, they are not on the Roll. They have moved house, the Electorate boundaries have changed, or they have just vanished from the system. The ability to enroll and/or do a Special Vote should be the right of all those who qualify to vote.
Our household is in a different electorate for 2026, resulting from a boundary change. I'm assuming that the Electoral Commission, when they send out their advance notices, they will place us in the new electorate; but I could be wrong.
Never assume! We've been at our present address for over 18 years, always in the same electorate too. I checked the registrations for our household a couple of months back, to make sure we were OK for the local body elections. There was no match on the database for the details I entered …. and as I was putting in those details I was prompted by the system with a "433A" for our house number. There isn't, and never has been a "433A"; we're plain old 433 and that's that. (We are on a back section though, so maybe hence the confusion somewhere.)
All sorted now, got our voting papers all right, but you can be certain we'll be double-checking again in plenty of time next year.
The entire COC coalition and the vast majority of its policies have "shades of Donald Trump" about them. This should be brought to electors attention during the 2026 campaign.
Imagine if a left wing government came up with some random voting change that happened to disenfranchise 100k farmers votes. The Herald wouldn't have a font big enough for it's DEMOCRACY UNDER ATTACK headline.
Luxon is a man of beliefs but not all facts are consistent with those. Undoubtedly, Luxon will be ‘relaxed’ with such inconsistencies and shrug them off.
https://www.bundestag.de/dokumente/textarchiv/2025/kw11-bundeswahlausschuss-1056272
Oh boy, those über-efficient Germans are as slow as a Trabant on a German Autobahn.
And German voters have ID cards! It's almost like the right-wing talking points about electoral fraud are a load of old cobblers or something.
https://www.bundeswahlleiterin.de/en/service/glossar/a/ausweispflicht.html
But I take your point and agree.
A look at the information on the Australian Electoral Commission's web site shows another country that takes longer than Aotearoa to get a final result. Maybe Mr Luxon has an aversion to talking in facts?
Look no further for an explanation of why National's trying to disenfranchise a swag of voters – they know that special votes don't favour them, so they want to reduce the number.
A lot of time was taken because there were very many parties and all parties needed to be counted.
I'm sure that's one of many factors but it did contribute, I think.
That said, it took Mr Businessman negotiator a record amount of time to form a government so those who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.
Yet another example of this Government being laser focused on delivery. Of unnecessary solutions to problems that don't exist.
When even the Chief Electoral Officer shrugs at select committee and says these reforms weren’t asked for, it tells you everything.
It’s like ACT and National read the recipe for fascism, then made a trifle stuffed with mince.
If you rely on inventing a problem to justify authoritarianism, the least you can do is make it believable.
Luxon's behaviour means it’s now fair to question his Christianity.
This is such a waste of time by the government. But also, I hardly see the likelihood that 55k votes will make a difference to the next election outcome. The election will be decided by whether the average kiwis are feeling relief as the OCR cuts flow through to the economy and cost of living starting to head in the right direction or not.
Irrespective of whether or not 55,000 votes make a difference to the outcome (i.e., candidates elected and/or seats allocated), the most important issue here is the stepwise erosion of one of the cornerstones of our democracy that will die from a thousand cuts if we don’t protect it – the law change is unnecessary and pretentious.
Where do you draw the line at the number of disenfranchised voters, 100,000 perhaps, and why would those voters differ from “the average kiwis”?
Unless you really struggle at counting, the three-seat change was a result of all special votes, of which there were more than 600,000 in the 2023 election. So yeh I don't think 55k votes really matters in this context. My line is that I wouldn't make the change at all, seems like a waste of time, that is very unlikely to impact the outcome of the election.
It is equally a waste of time having this author pushing spin that three seats would change be referencing the 55k number without the context of the greater than 600k total number of specials (especially given specials are forecast to increase with ever more NZ citizens fleeing to Australia and other countries).
Perhaps it will die from 1000 cuts, perhaps not. It seems to me it will just be something the next Labour led government reverses like the current flip flop between prisoner voting rights etc. It is small fry in the scheme of things and not huge substantial changes.
As far as I'm concerned it is a democratic right to turn up and vote on the day. We have always been able to make that work before, why not now?
And to belittle (dropkicks) people who do exercise that NORMAL democratic right is despicable. To criticize people as disorganised, or, can't get their shit together, is again belittling this group of people who are just doing what has always been NORMAL. The right are playing divide and rule again – THOSE people don't deserve to vote if they can't get their shit together.
I can forsee many university students being disenfranchised here- first time voting, exams, moving flats or moving home at election time. It's great for a student to just turn up and have it 'sorted' on the day.