The cut-off date to enrol for the November 7 election is coming up and if you’ve missed the boat, there are no exceptions, the Electoral Commission says.
Voters have until midnight Sunday October 25 to enrol either online or by posting in their enrolment form.
Record numbers expected to miss out at the polls due to new voting rules - Watch on TVNZ+
From October 26, more than 2300 voting locations will open up around the country and stay open until election day.
Unlike previous elections, this year voters won’t be able to show up and enrol at a voting booth at the same time as casting a vote.
According to election trends and 2023 data, that’s potentially hundreds of thousands of voters who could miss out this year.
Electoral data shows an increasing trend of late voter enrolment over the years. In 2023 an unprecedented number of more than 600,000 voters had to cast a special vote, mainly because they hadn’t enrolled by writ day, when the electoral rolls close.
In total, 450,000 of those special votes were cast by voters who enrolled in the two week period before the election. That includes 110,000 voters who left their enrolment until election day.
That’s nearly half a million votes which wouldn’t count this year under the new law changes. It’s enough to shift a general election result.
Add to that an expected surge of disallowed votes, which is essentially a wasted vote. A disallowed vote is when a voter casts a special vote only for an electoral officer to later find out they weren’t actually enrolled.
The Electoral Commission estimates the number of disallowed special votes to be five times higher this election at about 55,000.
There are also other ways a vote can be disallowed or thrown out. More than 42,000 electorate votes were thrown out last election mainly because voters hadn’t updated their correct address.
For those voters, their party vote still counted but their tick for their local electorate MP did not. The commission estimates more than 72,000 electorate votes could be thrown out this year.
Could you still turn up to vote anyway?
The Commission says if there’s any doubt, people can go to a voting booth and talk to an electoral officer and check the roll. If they believe they are enrolled they can cast a special vote.
But the commission is clear – if it turns out they aren’t enrolled, their vote won't count.
Why the law change?
The surge in special votes in 2023 increased by 46% compared to the 2020 election. It resulted in about 100,000 more special votes than the Electoral Commission had projected, adding extra pressure on staff during the manual vote count and a higher risk for errors.
Special votes take about 10 times longer to process because they require extra checks to determine if they are valid.
In 2023, candidate vote errors were identified in 15 electorates (at 17 voting places) and party vote errors were identified in six electorates (at eight voting places).
The errors didn’t affect the overall result, but it eventually led to an independent review by the Auditor-General and a raft of recommendations to improve and strengthen the integrity of the election process.
By December 2025, Parliament passed legislative changes which included closing voter enrolment 13 days before election day. It also reinstated a total ban on prisoner voting for prisoners sentenced after December 2025.
Both changes have been widely criticised with Electoral Commission data indicating the early enrolment cut off date will likely disenfranchise Māori, Asian, and Pasifika communities as well as young people who are more likely to cast special votes.
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