Why Making Democracy Harder is Always the Point
How NZ's Voting "Reform" Reveals the Infrastructure of Exclusion
Dear Curious Minds,
I clearly failed at my overly ambitious, perhaps delusional, plan to finish this draft at the airport last night before my flight home. So, for the first time since Entangled Curiosities began in October last year, this is a Tuesday newsletter for you. I hope I didn’t keep you waiting or worrying. My holiday was great, but it’s equally great to be home and rub my face on Mocha’s belly. Thank you for being here, I appreciate you.
It’s a rare and startling thing when a government’s own chief law officer declares its flagship legislation to be in breach of the country's constitutional rights. In a quietly released report that slipped onto the Ministry of Justice website just in time for the weekend news dump, Attorney-General Judith Collins formally confirmed what many of us already knew; the proposed electoral "reforms" are a deliberate attack on voting rights, likely to disenfranchise over 100,000 New Zealanders.
It’s the political equivalent of the referee calling a foul on their own team captain. Yet, that’s precisely what has happened. It was a formal report that her government's Electoral Amendment Bill clashes with the fundamental rights of New Zealanders (maybe the trick is for me to go on holidays more often for these things occur regularly).
The bill's most contentious provision seeks to eliminate same-day voter enrolment, slamming the door shut 13 days before an election. The government’s justification is to reduce a supposed "administrative burden" and speed up the vote count. We are supposed to believe this is such an inconvenience that it justifies disenfranchising a population the size of Dunedin.
The Manufactured Crisis: Unmasking the "Administrative Burden"
Let's not beat around the bush. The government’s case rests almost entirely on a manufactured crisis. The primary evidence for this systemic failure is that the 2023 final vote count took three weeks, not two. While the Auditor-General's report noted the pressure on the Electoral Commission, it did not recommend banning same-day enrolments and confirmed that the election outcome would not have changed. As commentator Mountain Tui notes, the count was completed in 20 days, well within the statutory timeframe.
The "crisis," therefore, is not one of democratic failure but of administrative impatience. Instead of investing in capacity or technology, the government has chosen the simplest and most cynical solution: eliminate the voters who generate the workload.
This political choice is revealed in the rhetoric of the bill's supporters. We have our Deputy Prime Minister stating he was "sick of dropkicks that can't get themselves organised," and ACT's justice spokesman describing late enrollers as "completely disengaged and lazy." This language is a classic tool of voter suppression. It transforms a democratic right into a privilege reserved for those who meet a certain standard of administrative competence, creating a moral hierarchy of voters. It's a psychological poll tax, designed to make people feel their exclusion is their own fault.
This isn’t about logistics; it’s an ideological project to shrink the electorate.
The Intersectional Fault Lines: Who Really Pays the Price?
From an intersectional perspective, the unequal impact of this bill isn't a flaw, it's the feature. It's surgical precision with electoral consequences.
The government's own analysis warns that Māori, Asian, Pasifika, and younger voters are the demographics most likely to enrol late. The data is stark. In 2023, nearly half (48%) of all young Māori voters aged 18-19 relied on the late enrolment period.
To remove this pathway is to knowingly disenfranchise them. As analysis from Mountain Tui highlights, these votes were politically decisive in 2023, giving Te Pāti Māori two more electorates and the Greens an extra list seat, while National lost two MPs. Without these votes, National and ACT could have governed alone. It’s little wonder they dislike the system as it stands amd why this government wants to silence it.
But the scale is even more staggering than initially reported. As Mountain Tui revealed last week, the proposed changes would actually affect approximately 560,000 voters, which is over 75% of all special votes from the 2023 election. That's roughly 15-20% of all voters, numbers that exceed the combined total votes for both ACT and NZ First by 107%.
The proposed law would ban electoral enrolment in the 13 days before an election, ostensibly to "speed up the vote count." Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith, channelling his inner efficiency expert, claims this administrative convenience justifies denying citizens their fundamental democratic right. Because apparently, in a country that once prided itself on being nuclear-free and pioneering women's suffrage, we've decided that democracy should run on the schedule of a suburban Pak’nSave checkout.
But here's what sits in my chest every time the word ‘efficiency’ gets thrown around, especially in the last 18 months. The quiet, familiar recognition of bureaucratic violence dressed as administrative necessity.
The behavioural science here is straightforward: every additional step, every extra form, every arbitrary deadline functions as what economists call a "friction cost." These costs aren't never neutral; they disproportionately impact people whose lives don't conform to middle-class, Pākehā, settled patterns of existence.
The International Standard: Making Democracy the Default
The debate has exposed the deeper flaw in our system: New Zealand’s "opt-in" registration model is an anachronism. While we led the world in women's suffrage, our system now lags decades behind our peers. It’s as if we invented the jet engine but still insist on travelling by horse and cart.
Modern democracies assume that if you exist as a citizen, you should be able to vote. They invest in infrastructure that makes participation the default:
In South Korea, there is no formal voter registration process. Citizens operate within a omprehensive resident registration system (주민등록, jumin deungnok) where every citizen receives a unique 13-digit number at birth that follows you through life—healthcare, banking, employment, and voting. All citizens over 18 are automatically listed on the electoral roll for each election. Citizens can vote early at any residents' centre (주민센터) nationwide. The infrastructure simply assumes that if you exist as a citizen, you should be able to vote.
This isn't unique. Across developed democracies, automatic registration is standard practice:
Australia: Compulsory registration with automatic updates and comprehensive civic education campaigns.
Canada: Permanent National Register with automatic updates from tax returns and government databases.
Chile: Since 2012, automatic registration based on Civil Registry Office databases, with citizens added at age 17.
Denmark: All citizens included in the national register with unique identification numbers integrating across all government services.
The pattern is clear: developed democracies are moving toward making voting easier, not harder. They're investing in infrastructure that assumes citizens should vote, not that they must prove they deserve to.
The technical infrastructure for this already exists in Aotearoa. We have IRD databases that track every citizen for tax, ACC records, and MSD databases. We can automatically identify every citizen's financial obligations to the state, but claim we can't automatically enrol them in their democratic rights. The resistance isn't technical; it's ideological. It preserves a status quo that benefits from a more restricted, predictable electorate.
The Intersectional Lens: What Democracy as Infrastructure Actually Looks Like
Navigating between the Korean and New Zealand systems taught me a fundamental lesson. Democracy isn't just about elections; it's about the everyday infrastructure that makes civic participation possible or impossible.
The resident registration system (jumin deungnok) in Korea isn't just about elections; it's the foundation of social citizenship. Your 13-digit number connects you to healthcare, education, banking, employment, and democratic participation as seamlessly as your birth certificate proves your existence. There is no separate voter registration process because voter eligibility flows automatically from the resident registration database. All citizens over 18 are automatically listed on the electoral roll for each election. Citizens can vote early at any residents' centre nationwide. The infrastructure assumes that if you're a citizen, you participate in civic life.
This comprehensive approach reflects a fundamentally different relationship between citizen and state. In Korea, the state's legitimacy depends partly on its ability to serve all citizens efficiently. Complex bureaucratic barriers to basic civic participation would be viewed as a state failure, not an individual responsibility.
Why New Zealand Chooses Fragmentation
So why does New Zealand, my chosen home with identical technical capabilities, choose the opposite approach? The answer is an ideological one. I daresay we are led to believe it is way more complicated than it needs to be.
We have IRD databases that automatically track every citizen's tax obligations from birth to death. We have ACC systems that follow us through the injury and recovery process. We can automatically enrol citizens in student debt that follows them across decades, and MSD databases that immediately notify us when someone needs support. We can track down citizens living overseas for unpaid parking fines, but we cannot (or will not) automatically enrol them for their democratic rights.
This fragmentation isn't accidental; it's designed to preserve political control over who participates in democracy. Both major parties have historically benefited from low, predictable turnout patterns. National's resistance is more obvious. Their core demographic (older, settled, property-owning Pākehā) are already well-represented in enrolment patterns. However, Labour's ambivalence reveals something more troubling, as even supposedly progressive parties fear genuine democratic inclusion when it threatens their ability to manage electoral outcomes.
The Commonwealth Hangover: Our resistance reflects deeper colonial patterns of conditional citizenship. Like other Westminster systems, we've inherited democracy as earned privilege rather than inherent right. The idea that citizens must prove their worthiness to participate politically aligns with colonial frameworks where full citizenship was always conditional on property ownership, cultural assimilation, and bureaucratic compliance.
The Neoliberal Story: Since the 1980s, we've convinced ourselves that individual responsibility should replace collective infrastructure. Making citizens responsible for their own electoral participation fits perfectly with broader narratives about self-reliance and personal accountability. Why invest in democratic infrastructure when you can blame citizens for their own exclusion?
What Goldsmith is proposing would dial back democratic access to 2002 levels, over 23 years of regression. This isn't just a policy reversal; it's importing American-style voter suppression tactics into our constitutional framework, and defying strong independent Electoral Review recommendations that pointed toward digitisation and flexibility, not restriction.
How Exclusion Actually Works: The Psychology of Bureaucratic Violence
The social psychology of voter suppression operates through what scholars call "psychological poll taxes". Let's me try and make this abundantly clear.
Picture Anna, a solo parent working two shifts, who had to move three times in a year chasing affordable rent, having to be a long drive away from much her support networks. She wants to make the best decision for her family and knows she must pay attention to the big stuff like politics. Between ensuring picking her children up, getting to work on time in her precarious old car, staying hypervigilant about the abusive ex, every additional bureaucratic step such as remembering deadlines, finding time during business hours, navigating government websites compete directly with immediate survival needs. The 13-day deadline forces her to choose: take unpaid time off work to sort enrolment or pay rent. When she inevitably misses the arbitrary cutoff, she doesn't think "I've been systematically disenfranchised." She thinks "I'm hopeless at this stuff" and maybe decides politics isn't for people like her anyway.
This psychological adaptation, convincing ourselves we weren't really interested when systems exclude us, protects our sense of agency while serving power's agenda perfectly. It transforms systemic exclusion into personal failure, making victims complicit in their own disenfranchisement.
The Escalating Logic: Each restriction makes the next easier to implement. Once we accept that democracy should be convenient for administrators rather than accessible to citizens, we've established that bureaucratic efficiency matters more than democratic participation. This psychological shift creates the foundation for increasingly authoritarian restrictions.
The timing reveals everything. Voter suppression consistently accompanies authoritarian movements globally because it serves multiple functions: reduces opposition turnout, normalises conditional democracy, and creates legal precedents for further restrictions. That this is happening precisely as polling shows this government facing electoral defeat tells us everything about their democratic commitments.
What We're Really Fighting For
Deputy Prime Minister David Seymour wasn’t mincing his words when he described how he felt about New Zealanders who enrol within the voting period "dropkicks." This isn't casual classism, it's a declaration of political hierarchy.
This attitude isn't isolated. We've seen vile sexual rumours about Tory Whanau during council meetings. We've watched the Prime Minister lose his temper and call the opposition leader "frickin'" when confronted with his failures. This coalition demonstrates a remarkable disregard for both democratic norms and the people it is supposed to serve.
In 2023, the 560,000 people who would be disenfranchised under Goldsmith's proposal included young people voting for the first time, families dealing with housing instability, shift workers who couldn't predict their schedules, people returning from overseas, and recent immigrants navigating their first New Zealand election. These votes gave Te Pāti Māori two additional electorates, the Greens an extra list seat, and cost National two MPs. The democratic result spoke for itself, which is precisely why this government wants to silence it.
Here's what these reveal: when they say "dropkicks," they mean "people whose votes we can't control." When they say "administrative efficiency," they mean "electoral manipulation." When they say "reform," they mean "regression to when democracy was safely limited to people like us."
The Real Choice
Here's what this debate is really about: Are we a democracy that trusts citizens, or are we a democracy that requires citizens to prove their worthiness?
Every democracy faces moments where it must decide whether to expand access or restrict it, whether to trust citizens or control them, whether to invest in inclusion or preserve exclusion. That this government is choosing restriction precisely when polling shows them facing defeat tells us everything we need to know about their democratic commitments.
The Attorney-General has clearly stated what this law will do: disenfranchise over 100,000 New Zealanders (potentially 560,000, according to recent analysis) to achieve marginal administrative efficiency. The question is whether we'll allow it.
Because once we accept that democracy should be convenient for administrators rather than accessible to citizens, we've already lost the thing we think we're protecting.
This is democracy. This is intersectionality as infrastructure. This is what happens when we stop asking who systems serve and start asking who they exclude.
And this, ultimately, is what we're fighting for: the radical idea that every citizen matters enough to make voting possible, not just convenient for those who already have power.
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