People with more wealth enjoy better health, and their children get a head start in life. Pretty obvious, really. Yet criticism of this state of affairs is often attributed to the politics of envy. We hear a whole lot less about the politics of contempt, although that seems to have driven the recent changes to our voting laws. For no good reason, the right of citizens to both enrol and vote on election day has been abolished.
Citizens must now have registered to vote at least 13 days before election day. People have also lost the right to cast a special vote for their local MP in the electorate where they normally reside, should they happen on election day to be out of their home electorate – due to being, say, a student temporarily living in another city, or being on holiday, or travelling on business. Prisoners too, have once again lost their right to vote, even though a previous National Party Attorney-General told Parliament that such a ban is “unjustifiably inconsistent” with the Bill of Rights.
In a Spinoff article, Otago University law professor Andrew Geddis has summed up the situation:
We have a right-of-centre coalition government championing a law change that was not recommended to them as a solution, which goes against the traditional grain of our electoral laws, and which will predominantly disenfranchise individuals prone to supporting their political opponents. It is a good thing I am not conspiratorially minded, otherwise some grim conclusions might be drawn.
The government’s excuse is that these changes will speed up the voting count. (As Geddis indicates below, they probably won’t.) Yes, an increasing number of special votes are being cast on election day, and special votes do take additional time to be checked. Reportedly, just over 600,000 of the votes cast in 2023 were special votes, which is roughly one fifth of all the votes cast. Plainly, this surge in special voting should be being welcomed, and treated as an expansion of democracy. Adequate resources should be allocated to cope with the trend.
Instead, the rise in special voting has been treated as an intolerable problem, and access to special voting has been restricted accordingly. What’s next? Reducing the number of polling booths? Requiring a photo ID before a valid vote can be cast? For some strange reason, a 20 day wait for a final, accurately tabulated election result has been deemed to be far too long to tolerate.
It really, really isn’t. Other functioning social democracies routinely take longer to arrive at an accurate election tally and outcome. With the exception of the United States, the over-riding goal in Western social democracies has been to encourage (and enable) the greatest number of citizens to cast a valid vote. Instead, the Luxon government has chosen to do the opposite. It has just made it harder, not easier, to vote. Donald Trump would approve.
Targeting opponents
Who is most likely to have trouble complying with the new requirement to have registered to vote a fortnight before election day? Surely, it speaks volumes that invariably after the special votes have been counted, the votes cast for the centre-left will increase. Under the new rules, who is most likely to miss out? Answer: young voters. Students. Maori. The Pasifika community. Renters shifting addresses from one electorate into another, people on low incomes working long hours at multiple jobs etc.
There are valid reasons why many, many people don’t focus on the voting process until the eve of the election. But this is not the planet inhabited by the privileged white politicians of ACT and the National Party. (Besides, why bother to respect the democratic rights of people unlikely to vote for you?)
Dropkicks, Unite
This is where the politics of contempt really come into play. Previously, Christopher Luxon has made it crystal clear what he thinks of people who are struggling to make ends meet. Luxon called them “bottom feeders.” ACT Party leader David Seymour has described the thousands of people likely to be affected by the voting changes as “dropkicks.” Moreover, these “dropkicks” are likely to vote for policies that ACT doesn’t like. As Seymour put it:
“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.”
In other words, people who don’t share Seymour’s views on progressive taxation deserve to lose the right to vote. (So much for ACT being the champion of free speech.) At this point, we should take a moment to mourn what we have lost. Previously, friends in other countries have expressed to me their admiration for how easy and accessible it is to cast a valid vote in this country compared to, say, the situation in the United Kingdom.
In their view, we should be proud of this commitment to social democracy. Well, thanks to the likes of Seymour and Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith, that commitment no longer exists.
Footnote One: To be clear: the changes do not prevent the casting of a special vote. What they will require of officials is further checking (on the updated rolls) as to whether the special vote has met the registration deadline – and whether, in some circumstances, it can still be counted as a party vote, even if the electorate vote on the same ballot is to be disallowed. Putting the implications for democracy to one side, these new wrinkles to the vetting process are likely to cancel out any timing gains made by scrapping the right to simultaneous registration/voting on election day.
Geddis again, lucidly explains the new complexity:
Electoral officials will then still need to process the declaration in order to work out that the individual isn’t actually enrolled to vote anywhere. Only then will the vote be discarded from the vote count – all that changes is that the electoral roll is not updated to include their details (so their vote remains in the count).
Equally, if you are enrolled but have changed residence without updating your details you can fill out a special vote declaration and cast a vote. The electoral officials will then process your declaration in order to work out that although you have enrolled to vote (and so can cast a party vote), you did so in the wrong electorate (so they cannot count your electorate vote). Again, this may save some time, or it may just create more complexity.
In the light of the above, Geddis feels that the stated goals of the changes – ballots being counted faster – may well fail to be achieved. He suspects that the government already knows it is likely to fail to meet its target:
We might start by noting that while his announcement of the changes complained that “[t]he final vote count used to take two weeks, last election it took three”, the accompanying bill will not change this timetable. So, apparently the government is at least resignedly accepting of a 20-day wait for final election results. Whether that 20-day timeframe can accommodate the necessary vote processing and counting, even with the government’s proposed changes, is still questionable.
Meaning: even if the government seriously believed that reducing the wait-time for final election results from three weeks to two weeks was worth preventing thousands of people from casting a valid vote…they have quietly accepted that the results are unlikely to arrive any sooner, regardless.
That being so…what residual motive for the changes to the voting law does that leave? The only conclusion is that the Luxon government has changed the election process in order to make it more difficult for thousands of people to vote for the opposition. Yes, it can happen here. And anyone still willing to vote for the centre-right in November should be prepared to face the accusation that they are being accomplices to a perversion of the election process.
On the Corner
Incredibly, it is now almost 30 years since Norman Cook re-mixed Cornershop’s “Brimful of Asha” and turned it into a massive international hit. Down the years since, Tjinder Singh has released a steady stream of Punjabi-inflected pop songs (e.g. “Disco’s Main Squeeze” and “St. Marie Under Canon”) that should have rescued Cornershop from being a one-hit wonder.
Last week, Singh released a new Cornershop single featuring Bubbley Kaur on vocals. The official video for “Bounce and Salute” is a warm tribute to the process (and people) involved in pressing vinyl records:
BTW, Bubbley Kaur is the pseudonym of a New Delhi-born woman who works in the laundromat that she, her husband and children own in Preston, Lancashire. Kaur has collaborated before with Singh; most notably on this endearing “Topknot” single from 2004: