How much does it cost to run an election?
By Susan Edmunds of RNZ
This year, the answer is about $180 million.
Putting aside the cost to candidates and political parties to run their campaigns, which runs to millions of dollars, the Electoral Commission has given a breakdown of what it expects to spend getting New Zealanders to the polls this year.
It said the biggest costs were the temporary workforce employed for the election, then property, paper, printing and postage. "These are all things we need to set up and run an election where all New Zealanders have the opportunity to enrol and vote."
It said this year there would be 22,000 temporary staff, 2321 election day voting places and nine million voting papers printed.
It has budgeted $94.7m for staff costs, $17.9m for communications, $11.6m for IT, $3.1m for travel and catering, $23.1m for property costs and $25.5m for printing and post. Other costs come in at just under $6m.
University of Otago professor Andrew Geddis said the Electoral Commission had to put in a request to the Minister of Justice outlining what funding it expected to need to run the election.
"The physical getting of votes and the associated advertising around it to tell people there is an election coming up and you've got an obligation to vote.
"In the end it is up to the minister to decide whether or not to take that bid into the budget-setting process to the Minister of Finance, and say 'this is what I am going to need in order to fund the election properly' and the Minister of Finance to then go 'yep, okay, I'm going to include that in the Budget'. There is no statutory formula, or anything like that."
He said the 90% enrolment had been steady over the years and turnout in the high 70s was good by international standards.
But he said the Electoral Commission was facing a bigger problem in how much of its interaction with voters happened through the post.
"That is becoming more and more of a problem because the postal service has just started to fall apart. The Electoral Commission was given some money in the most recent Budgets … to try to start modernising everything and do work to try to bring more of those enrolment services online, in recognition that the postal service just isn't going to manage in the future."
This year, many voters will get their Easy Vote cards via email rather than post.
He said ultimately how much the commission was given to run the election was up to the government. There was a case that went to the Court of Appeal in the mid-1990s regarding the Māori electoral option, where it was argued the government wasn't doing enough to publicise the Māori roll option.
"The Court of Appeal said the government has provided a sum of money and the government has met its obligations. The Court of Appeal also said that there is a implied duty on central government to make sure that essentially the electoral system is properly funded, and that people are appropriately told about their democratic rights and so on... but it's up to the government to put a dollar figure on it.
"You could see a world in which if a future government ever did try to essentially starve the electoral system, you could use that case to go to court and get a court to order the government to put more money into the system."
He said while all political parties had a strong interest in how the system worked, he was not aware of any party ever having claimed the government was not doing enough to fund elections.
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"Whatever concerns we might have about a government not appropriately funding democracy, it's the sort of thing that if it was happening you could imagine the opposition parties being very vocal about it. The fact they haven't been is perhaps an indication that on this one the government is [doing] what it should."
Victoria University associate professor Lara Greaves said the amount the Electoral Commission was given should at least increase with inflation each election and potentially jump further because of demographic changes.
"We have got more ethnically diverse populations and those populations have relationships to government where they might need a different way of being reached and so that costs money."
She said the post was a problem. "The other thing is that people don't necessarily have their physical addresses up-to-date anymore as much.
"So one of the things in the electoral law changes in this term were not only to make it so people couldn't enrol in the advance voting period, but they also did change some of the provisions to allow for data matching across agencies to be able to manually update addresses, to enrol people automatically... they haven't really made an investment in that at this point.
"That actually needs quite a decent chunk of IT investment to be able to link those data up."
She said it had been suggested a live digital roll mark-off would speed up the vote count but that would also require significant investment.
She said there was not enough money being made available for the process.
"What I would do if I I wanted to downgrade our democracy, if I wanted to let it erode a bit would be not fund at least at inflation but also not fund those kinds of projects that update the system, take it out of the 1950s which has been what's been needed for quite some time."
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