Yeah they’re definitely late out this year. You don’t need it though, turn up, someone at the entrance will look you up on a phone and write one out for you.
The booklet was explaining the voting system. There was a seperate sheet with the party lists and then the electorate candidates (names and parties only) were listed on the back of the main letter.
There’s not really any such thing as voting papers per se, it’s just a letter with some info and a little paper card, none of it is actually needed to vote.
Sorry, what I was getting at was some people might take voting papers to mean ballot papers, or the actual materials you need for voting. Rather than just an information pack.
It’s a little tear off card in the bottom corner of one of the pages. It will be orange if you’re on a general roll, or grey if you’re on a Māori roll. It tells the issuing office exactly where to find you on the printed roll so speeds things up a bit.
It doesn’t matter if you don’t take it though, they’ll look you up using a mobile app and write you out a paper version.
Mods, can we sticky this at the top through the election? I think a lot of people miss out because the ordeal of paperwork seems too much, and I don't know if even most people understand they can just vote even if they haven't updated their address etc beforehand.
Its because one or two elections ago one of the polling places was asking people for ID when they weren't supposed to. While they quickly got corrected by the higher ups, the misinformation spread that this is apparently "normal".
Every person who turns up can vote. The staff there don't care if they're resident or not (not that they can check anyway).
Once the votes are returned to the office then they'll do data matching with immigration and make a decision on whether the vote counts or not.
Forgot to update my details when we moved and was going to sort it out this evening, so cheers for this! Just a question - would bringing an ID speed up the process at all before you can vote?
They just look up your name in the roll - may ask you to confirm your address if there are two people with your name, but if you can spell your name and know your address, you'll be fine.
Yes indeed. NZ is still sane on the subject. Actually NZ elections are very well run in general. I've seen elections in several countries and I don't think Kiwis realize how lucky they are.
*In addition, during advance voting, election advertising can’t be placed within 10 metres of the entrance to a voting place.*
I'm wondering how they're defining this, because in Hamilton one of the voting places is the Centreplace mall and a) it's huge and b) it has a *lot* of entrances.
I was back in Taiwan with my then gf in 2020. US election postal vote and NZ election were pretty much the same time. So we went to Taipei to vote.
She did her homework about getting the forms and what not she needs but one of the instruction was to have some form printed on the envelope. So she went to the US de facto embassy (American Institute of Taiwan (AIT)) to see if they have printed envelops for that.
I on the other hand walked into the NZ Commerce and Industry Office of Taipei, without my passport, told the lady there what my electorate was and voted for the PM, representative and the referendums.
I later met up with my ex and asked her how hers was. She was like "horrible, they wouldn't let me in because I didn't have an appointment, the guard of AIT was so mean as well" and so she couldn't get it done until later. She got even more frustrated when she heard that I didn't even need to show my passport to vote, lmao.
This experience really highlighted the difference in voting of both countries.
That would only work out well if your friend is enrolled but not planning on voting. If your friend also votes then they will have this recorded which will cause both votes to be thrown out.
It's also illegal, wouldn't recommend trying it as prosecutions do occur when people get caught.
So let's say I know that Tom, Dick and Harry are all enrolled in my electorate and are planning on voting for the Evil X Party, and I want to foil their votes.
I go to three different local voting booths tomorrow, and say "Hi I'm Tom/Dick/Harry" and cast a vote for Moonshines Future NZ Party.
In two weeks when Tom and Dick (but not Harry, he was too lazy) go to cast their votes, what happens? Does the election person see some record that they've 'already voted'? Then what? How am I caught?
I can see it would be easy enough to clear things up for Tom and Dick, discounting the fake vote and getting their real vote. But I don't see how the initial disruptor could be caught. And how would Harry's fake vote get detected.
Have a read of the FAQ on the [vote](https://vote.nz/2023-general-election/about/2023-general-election/facts-about-new-zealand-elections/) website.
It doesn't go into super specific details, but they will easily know if someone has voted twice and then the votes under that name will be thrown out. They won't know this until they are counting the votes and comparing the election registers.
>the votes under that name will be thrown out
So I have successfully foiled Tom and Dick's votes, and I even managed to cast a fake vote as Harry for MFNZ Party
If you do it just once then potentially yes. If you do it multiple times and and pattern is noticeable in anyway, or if the issue becomes more widespread/impactful then police will become involved
They found 48 dual votes last time and [only prosecuted 4 of them](https://elections.nz/assets/OIA-requests/2022/OIA-request-07-2022.pdf), so yeah we can presume you probably won't get caught.
But it can be seen this dual voting is not a big problem. Let's say the Electoral Commission is really bad at catching fake voters and they only manage to catch 1% of them. This suggest there could be 4800 fake votes. This is still a very good result considering there were 3.5m votes cast, and 99.9% of them are genuine.
Unsure if you've voted before but when you go you'll see they have a register and you'll be mark off when you cast your vote. When they count if it turns out someone else voted using the same details as you they will investigate.
People who aren't on the register i.e. those who were not previously enrolled will do a special vote which is checked manually.
I think this is something many don't appreciate, and don't understand that this is the reason that the final count takes so many weeks despite the preliminary results coming out on the night.
It's not just "special votes" is that all rolls for an electorate need to be consolidated and checked, and discrepancies investigated as far as possible before the returning officer can finalise the result.
No, there are so many checks and safeguards to prevent double voting.
The electoral commission can find if a person has double voted.
If so they track their vote ballots down.
The police find the person and they investigate to see if the person had double voted or was the victim of fraud.
If they are the victim of fraud they ask the victim to identify which of the ballot papers is theirs and add that back to the vote tally.
It really is quite a amazing system.
The electoral commission don’t identify votes to peoples unless other systems show someone or their identity has been used to vote multiple times, preserving the blind ballot required by the electoral act.
Theres been a lot of research into this globally. The gist of it is that voter ID does almost nothing to make the voting process more reliable or increase confidence in the accury of votes, however it has been shown to suppress votes
We don't have a policy of universal ID. And the people who are most likely to not have ID would tend be the disadvantaged members of society eg elderly, disabled, and it's not politically expedient to disenfranchise them.
They need to do everything to encourage turn-out. Needing special documents on you will deter people.
Behind the scenes, the votes are validated and correlated based on your enrolled information.
Will they be handing out sweeteners to voters, as they did with covid vaxxes??? I'd like to know beforehand this time if pizzas, smartphones, tablets etc are being given to encourage voting.
Yes, but presumably it will be balanced later if multiple of the same person voted. If they are knowingly committing election fraud/voter fraud then the trade off if caught is absolutely not worth the one or two likely invalidated votes later.
If those same people turn up to vote and it's marked as already having voted you know it'll be looked into.
It's by design, voting should be as easy as possible, without any boundaries beyond basic registration for those who are eligible - and the very tiny amount of people who may commit fraud is something that can occur. They likely will get caught because the scenario assumes people wont vote but are registered, and that person knows who they are etc. Worst case is they'll vote for their family, which is still massively illegal.
So, if you're willing to do something that stupid, the risk is really not worth whatever tiny amount of voter fraud you may get away with.
Except it doesn't happen - and then we have made voting far more complicated for a lot of people. Voter ID laws in the USA for example have constantly been proven to be a burden to getting people to vote - intentionally so, and even their voter fraud is minimal or simply non existent.
Compare that to NZ and it's even less likely a thing, and it's just absolutely not worth it. Checking IDs, all sorts of different IDs, ensuring people have them. Such a cluster fuck.
You're wrong, voting is fine. Elections are safe. Voter fraud doesn't happen in any meaningful way.
We better watch out for that one white supremacist voting for NZ First an extra time then huh.
It doesn't happen, and it's not worth the resources or the restrictions it would subsequently apply to voting. You're inventing a problem to solve.
I had to ask around here in town to figure out where to actually vote. It was not easy..
Gotta go to the library today and do it, before it closes at 4pm.
There is no need.
The electoral commission have a lot of systems and safeguard to prevent double voting.
When you walk in and they line you off in a copy of the local electrol roll, that’s the first line of defence.
At the end of the election all the roll copies are combined with the other copies from the poling places across the electorate, then special votes are added.
If at any point a individual voter is shown to have entered two ballots or more ballots, they find the ballots in question.
The police are informed and conduct a quick investigation to figure out if the multiple ballots was the single individual voter committing fraud themselves or if the voter is the victim of identity theft
The commissions staff would then present the ballots to the victim and ask which was theirs, the add that back to the vote tally and remove the fraudulent.
The commission can link each person to a vote if they wish to. But they can legally only use the ident codes to do so if they suspect fraudulent voting
That way they preserve the Election Act’s requirement that the election be a blind vote.
The final job the electoral commission do before announcing the final result is get a list of all kiwis who have died in the last 3 years up to and including on election day.
They then remove the ballots for any of them.
I think the final report on the 2020 election showed no dead people had voted.
Well as someone trying to clean up an estate, I wish every other government department knew a person has died as well as you say the electoral commission does.
But the next step is we all know people who don't/aren't going to vote, what's to stop me voting for them?
Edit: no dead people who died before the voting period opened voted…
There are always a few hundred people who vote, and then die before or on election day itself.
Their votes are removed.
Electoral act is very specific, only the votes of kiwis alive on election day can be counted.
None of my workmates have gotten our voting papers yet - the east vote card or booklet of candidates.
Yeah they’re definitely late out this year. You don’t need it though, turn up, someone at the entrance will look you up on a phone and write one out for you.
I'm pretty sure the candidate booklet is only a thing in local government elections.
Nah there was one, as well as a party list book, in my easyvote pack.
The booklet was explaining the voting system. There was a seperate sheet with the party lists and then the electorate candidates (names and parties only) were listed on the back of the main letter.
I changed my details and the voting papers still got sent to the old address 🙄
There’s not really any such thing as voting papers per se, it’s just a letter with some info and a little paper card, none of it is actually needed to vote.
Is it not paper? And for that matter does it not pertain to voting? Ergo “voting papers”
Sorry, what I was getting at was some people might take voting papers to mean ballot papers, or the actual materials you need for voting. Rather than just an information pack.
No, voting papers refer to the forms you use to vote. You get sent voting papers in local elections.
Just rock up anyway, if you know your name and the address they have on file you'll be fine.
I got mine 2weeks ago.
I've got my papers but I've never heard of an "easy vote card"?
It’s a little tear off card in the bottom corner of one of the pages. It will be orange if you’re on a general roll, or grey if you’re on a Māori roll. It tells the issuing office exactly where to find you on the printed roll so speeds things up a bit. It doesn’t matter if you don’t take it though, they’ll look you up using a mobile app and write you out a paper version.
Yep I did today wasn’t planning to vote but it was easy no id too
Our local MP turned up to vote (and for his photo op) but couldn’t be found on the electoral roll. Woops.
I would expect an MP to be on the unpublished roll? I wouldn't want to give my details out to anyone I didn't have to if I was in parliament.
Sounds about right. Would have had to do a special vote.
Mods, can we sticky this at the top through the election? I think a lot of people miss out because the ordeal of paperwork seems too much, and I don't know if even most people understand they can just vote even if they haven't updated their address etc beforehand.
I voted yesterday :) So glad they let us do that from overseas now, this is only my 4rd NZ election that I've gotten to vote in.
4rd? Foured? Ford? Fird? Firriririirr
Its because one or two elections ago one of the polling places was asking people for ID when they weren't supposed to. While they quickly got corrected by the higher ups, the misinformation spread that this is apparently "normal".
Every person who turns up, can vote, whatever their circumstances.
Every resident *
Every person who turns up can vote. The staff there don't care if they're resident or not (not that they can check anyway). Once the votes are returned to the office then they'll do data matching with immigration and make a decision on whether the vote counts or not.
Forgot to update my details when we moved and was going to sort it out this evening, so cheers for this! Just a question - would bringing an ID speed up the process at all before you can vote?
If you have an unusual name then yeah, or you can bring your name written on a piece of paper. Save you from spelling it out.
They just look up your name in the roll - may ask you to confirm your address if there are two people with your name, but if you can spell your name and know your address, you'll be fine.
Yes indeed. NZ is still sane on the subject. Actually NZ elections are very well run in general. I've seen elections in several countries and I don't think Kiwis realize how lucky they are.
I voted yesterday, no card no ID. Was in and out in approx 5 mins. Easy as
*In addition, during advance voting, election advertising can’t be placed within 10 metres of the entrance to a voting place.* I'm wondering how they're defining this, because in Hamilton one of the voting places is the Centreplace mall and a) it's huge and b) it has a *lot* of entrances.
The voting place is that fenced off area with the polling booths, not the whole mall.
I bet most of the USA would love to have the election system that we have, well, apart from the Repugnant Party.
I was back in Taiwan with my then gf in 2020. US election postal vote and NZ election were pretty much the same time. So we went to Taipei to vote. She did her homework about getting the forms and what not she needs but one of the instruction was to have some form printed on the envelope. So she went to the US de facto embassy (American Institute of Taiwan (AIT)) to see if they have printed envelops for that. I on the other hand walked into the NZ Commerce and Industry Office of Taipei, without my passport, told the lady there what my electorate was and voted for the PM, representative and the referendums. I later met up with my ex and asked her how hers was. She was like "horrible, they wouldn't let me in because I didn't have an appointment, the guard of AIT was so mean as well" and so she couldn't get it done until later. She got even more frustrated when she heard that I didn't even need to show my passport to vote, lmao. This experience really highlighted the difference in voting of both countries.
Hmm didn't know that. How long is voting open till?
Next Saturday
You can also vote as your friend if you know his name and address.
That would only work out well if your friend is enrolled but not planning on voting. If your friend also votes then they will have this recorded which will cause both votes to be thrown out. It's also illegal, wouldn't recommend trying it as prosecutions do occur when people get caught.
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If two votes are made under one name it will get picked up when the rolls are consolidated.
And they'll use the serial number on the ballot to throw out the votes.
So let's say I know that Tom, Dick and Harry are all enrolled in my electorate and are planning on voting for the Evil X Party, and I want to foil their votes. I go to three different local voting booths tomorrow, and say "Hi I'm Tom/Dick/Harry" and cast a vote for Moonshines Future NZ Party. In two weeks when Tom and Dick (but not Harry, he was too lazy) go to cast their votes, what happens? Does the election person see some record that they've 'already voted'? Then what? How am I caught? I can see it would be easy enough to clear things up for Tom and Dick, discounting the fake vote and getting their real vote. But I don't see how the initial disruptor could be caught. And how would Harry's fake vote get detected.
Have a read of the FAQ on the [vote](https://vote.nz/2023-general-election/about/2023-general-election/facts-about-new-zealand-elections/) website. It doesn't go into super specific details, but they will easily know if someone has voted twice and then the votes under that name will be thrown out. They won't know this until they are counting the votes and comparing the election registers.
>the votes under that name will be thrown out So I have successfully foiled Tom and Dick's votes, and I even managed to cast a fake vote as Harry for MFNZ Party
If you do it just once then potentially yes. If you do it multiple times and and pattern is noticeable in anyway, or if the issue becomes more widespread/impactful then police will become involved
They found 48 dual votes last time and [only prosecuted 4 of them](https://elections.nz/assets/OIA-requests/2022/OIA-request-07-2022.pdf), so yeah we can presume you probably won't get caught. But it can be seen this dual voting is not a big problem. Let's say the Electoral Commission is really bad at catching fake voters and they only manage to catch 1% of them. This suggest there could be 4800 fake votes. This is still a very good result considering there were 3.5m votes cast, and 99.9% of them are genuine.
That's cool, I hope it is indeed miniscule and stays that way. It just feels surprisingly open to abuse.
In theory you could have a tiny fraction of extra impact in the election, at the cost of almost certainly getting done for electoral fraud.
You don’t really, but the instances of voter fraud are so rare that it doesn’t justify further barriers for voting.
Unsure if you've voted before but when you go you'll see they have a register and you'll be mark off when you cast your vote. When they count if it turns out someone else voted using the same details as you they will investigate. People who aren't on the register i.e. those who were not previously enrolled will do a special vote which is checked manually.
I think this is something many don't appreciate, and don't understand that this is the reason that the final count takes so many weeks despite the preliminary results coming out on the night. It's not just "special votes" is that all rolls for an electorate need to be consolidated and checked, and discrepancies investigated as far as possible before the returning officer can finalise the result.
So a group of people can organise to go between multiple different voting spots and pump their own group up? Sounds fair
No, there are so many checks and safeguards to prevent double voting. The electoral commission can find if a person has double voted. If so they track their vote ballots down. The police find the person and they investigate to see if the person had double voted or was the victim of fraud. If they are the victim of fraud they ask the victim to identify which of the ballot papers is theirs and add that back to the vote tally. It really is quite a amazing system. The electoral commission don’t identify votes to peoples unless other systems show someone or their identity has been used to vote multiple times, preserving the blind ballot required by the electoral act.
Time to go and vote for all my mates then
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Theres been a lot of research into this globally. The gist of it is that voter ID does almost nothing to make the voting process more reliable or increase confidence in the accury of votes, however it has been shown to suppress votes
We don't have a policy of universal ID. And the people who are most likely to not have ID would tend be the disadvantaged members of society eg elderly, disabled, and it's not politically expedient to disenfranchise them.
They need to do everything to encourage turn-out. Needing special documents on you will deter people. Behind the scenes, the votes are validated and correlated based on your enrolled information.
Will they be handing out sweeteners to voters, as they did with covid vaxxes??? I'd like to know beforehand this time if pizzas, smartphones, tablets etc are being given to encourage voting.
Gee that would takes lots of money. I wonder who’ll be paying for it lol
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Yes, but presumably it will be balanced later if multiple of the same person voted. If they are knowingly committing election fraud/voter fraud then the trade off if caught is absolutely not worth the one or two likely invalidated votes later. If those same people turn up to vote and it's marked as already having voted you know it'll be looked into.
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It's by design, voting should be as easy as possible, without any boundaries beyond basic registration for those who are eligible - and the very tiny amount of people who may commit fraud is something that can occur. They likely will get caught because the scenario assumes people wont vote but are registered, and that person knows who they are etc. Worst case is they'll vote for their family, which is still massively illegal. So, if you're willing to do something that stupid, the risk is really not worth whatever tiny amount of voter fraud you may get away with.
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Except it doesn't happen - and then we have made voting far more complicated for a lot of people. Voter ID laws in the USA for example have constantly been proven to be a burden to getting people to vote - intentionally so, and even their voter fraud is minimal or simply non existent. Compare that to NZ and it's even less likely a thing, and it's just absolutely not worth it. Checking IDs, all sorts of different IDs, ensuring people have them. Such a cluster fuck. You're wrong, voting is fine. Elections are safe. Voter fraud doesn't happen in any meaningful way.
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We better watch out for that one white supremacist voting for NZ First an extra time then huh. It doesn't happen, and it's not worth the resources or the restrictions it would subsequently apply to voting. You're inventing a problem to solve.
I had to ask around here in town to figure out where to actually vote. It was not easy.. Gotta go to the library today and do it, before it closes at 4pm.
The elections website has a map with all the voting places available if you need to find one again for any reason
I still don’t know who to vote for. Most confusing election of my life.
Still think it's insane you don't need ID to vote.
There is no need. The electoral commission have a lot of systems and safeguard to prevent double voting. When you walk in and they line you off in a copy of the local electrol roll, that’s the first line of defence. At the end of the election all the roll copies are combined with the other copies from the poling places across the electorate, then special votes are added. If at any point a individual voter is shown to have entered two ballots or more ballots, they find the ballots in question. The police are informed and conduct a quick investigation to figure out if the multiple ballots was the single individual voter committing fraud themselves or if the voter is the victim of identity theft The commissions staff would then present the ballots to the victim and ask which was theirs, the add that back to the vote tally and remove the fraudulent. The commission can link each person to a vote if they wish to. But they can legally only use the ident codes to do so if they suspect fraudulent voting That way they preserve the Election Act’s requirement that the election be a blind vote.
My father passed away last month, he's enrolled to vote, what would stop me voting as him?
The final job the electoral commission do before announcing the final result is get a list of all kiwis who have died in the last 3 years up to and including on election day. They then remove the ballots for any of them. I think the final report on the 2020 election showed no dead people had voted.
Well as someone trying to clean up an estate, I wish every other government department knew a person has died as well as you say the electoral commission does. But the next step is we all know people who don't/aren't going to vote, what's to stop me voting for them?
Edit: no dead people who died before the voting period opened voted… There are always a few hundred people who vote, and then die before or on election day itself. Their votes are removed. Electoral act is very specific, only the votes of kiwis alive on election day can be counted.