Source: Radio New Zealand
Karl le Quesne says the Commission is expecting increased numbers of special votes this election. RNZ / Russell Palmer
The Electoral Commission says it is pushing hard to boost enrolment – particularly among young people – because of the government’s changes restricting voting.
Chief executive Karl le Quesne also says he is confident contingency planning will avoid any problems with getting new digital systems – to protect against the kind of errors seen at the last election – set up in time.
Māori roll campaign to launch next week
The Commission briefed media on Thursday morning ahead of a new campaign to inform Māori voters about new rules enabling them to switch between the Māori and general role before 6 August.
Until March 2023, Māori were only allowed to switch rolls within a four-month period, once every five or six years after the census.
Enrolment packs will be sent out from Monday to about 562,000 voters of Māori descent, informing them which roll they are on and how to change rolls.
“If you don’t receive a pack by 11 April, it means you’re not enrolled or we don’t have the correct address for you,” chief advisor Māori Hone Matthews said.
“You can enrol, check or update your details online at vote.nz/enrol or call 0800 367656 for free and ask for an enrolment form to be sent to you.”
‘Let’s take enrolment to the people’
Le Quesne said the Commission was expecting to have increased numbers of special votes this election, despite changes banning prisoner voting, same-day enrolment votes, or voting if not enrolled at least 13 days before the election.
“It’s really, really hard to say, but that’s why we’re putting so much effort into enrolment and getting people to get enrolled and update their details well ahead of time,” Le Quesne said.
“We’re planning for a similar turnout rate, if not slightly higher, than the ’23 election. We have to plan for any eventuality.”
Special votes take about 10 times longer to count than standard votes.
Le Quesne previously told a select committee the changes – passed in December – would not speed up the final election results, despite government claims that was the purpose of the legislation.
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon then criticised the Commission as the “slowest folk on the planet”.
Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith has maintained the changes will keep the counting period from extending further in future, but Le Quesne on Thursday said it was “too hard to say” whether the law changes made any impact on how fast the count would be.
“At this stage, we’re still planning for 20 days,” he said, the same as the 2023 election. “If we can do it earlier, we will.”
He indicated any faster count was more likely to be the result of additional resources.
“We’ve done a lot of work looking at how we can make things go more efficiently, and that’s going to help us stay within the 20 days … if the special votes did go up to around that 700,000 mark or higher, it could take longer.”
He said the Commission would be launching its enrolment campaign in August, sending out “a heck of a lot of advertising” and using new methods to push up enrolment rates.
That includes in September setting up 10 enrolment hubs in places with a lot of foot traffic in main centres around the country – like malls and supermarkets – offering to sign people up to vote even if they belong to a different electorate.
Chief advisor Māori Hone Matthews. RNZ / Russell Palmer
“In the Tāmaki Makaurau by-election last year, we had some voting places in malls and supermarkets, and we found we were doing a lot of enrolment activity for people who weren’t even in that electorate,” he said.
“So it occurred to us, let’s take enrolment to the people … we’ll take enrolments anywhere, anytime.”
They would particularly be targeting young people.
“Working with schools, tertiary institutions, other venues where we know these young people, try and get that enrolment rate for young people up, it’s going to be really, really important.”
Email and text reminders will also be sent out en masse, and EasyVote cards – as well as being sent via mail – will for the first time be emailed out.
Le Quesne said the digital cards could be used either printed out or on smartphones.
The commission will also launch a $690,000 community education fund to provide grants to community groups that come up with ideas to help.
Those new measures were being done “off our own bat” as part of the Commission’s statutory role to ensure people were enrolled, with additional funding provided for that purpose.
“We’re not concerned about the workload,” Le Quesne said.
“Get enrolled, update your details by fourth of October. That means it’ll go much quicker for you in the voting place, and there’ll be fewer special votes.”
Commission confident over systems time-crunch
Le Quesne pushed back on a report from The Post published Thursday morning based on Commission documents, showing major risks around security certification for core voting systems.
The $80m modernisation programme followed a report from the Auditor-General that found the final check of official results was done under extreme pressure in the hours before being announced. That check – which normally takes two days – failed to find multiple errors.
Le Quesne said the Commission had done a “huge amount of work” to improve those processes, but he was confident everything would be ready in time.
“I’m not concerned about our preparations. We do a thorough program of testing, simulation, dress rehearsals, we build in contingency time around all of those, and we’re really confident we’re on track to deliver this year’s election,” he said.
“We’re doing simulations through April, we know we’ve got more time if we need it to do some more testing. Generally because we’ve done testing before simulation, we know things are working pretty well spot on. This is just looking for any final things we might need to fine tune – and often it’s about the training as well.”
Chairperson Simon Moore had, however, laid out just how complex delivering an election in New Zealand would be.
“I think very few people have an idea about how many moving parts there are … we have to recruit something between 25,000 and 28,000 people. We need to recruit them. We need to identify them. We need to train them. We need to send them out,” he said.
“Something like 2500 voting places – 800 during the advance voting stage – every one of those places has to be identified, has to be found to be appropriate, needs to be a place where people feel comfortable … and we need to secure short term leases for every single one of them.
“We print something like 9 million voting documents, papers for a voting population of around about 4 million. And those 9 million can’t be printed until we receive the nominations [about one month before election day].”
Le Quesne said the recruiting for those 25,000 to 28,000 roles involved interviews, criminal background checks, and follow-up monitoring.
“We really want to check that people who are working for us can be politically neutral and impartial. That’s really, really important,” he said.
“We just ask them the questions and as we go through the training, we get a sense of how people are responding … there’s a level of supervision and monitoring so we can check how people are going, and we can kind of point them in the right direction if anything’s coming up that’s not as we need it.”
– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand