Labour leader Chris Hipkins has promised that a government he leads would reverse the law change stopping people from enrolling to vote on election day, setting up one of the sharper constitutional arguments of the 2026 campaign.
Speaking on Monday, Hipkins said the change would catch out voters who have always been able to sort out their enrolment at the voting booth. RNZ reported him saying that people “will show up to vote on election day only to find that their vote will not be counted because they’re not on the roll, and that’s new”.
He went further on the principle behind it. “I don’t think that any individual government or party should gerrymander the electoral system to suit their own preferences,” Hipkins said. If large numbers of people turn up and are turned away, he said, “it will be an indictment on the track record of this government”.
The rule he is talking about comes from the Electoral Amendment Act, which passed in December 2025 with the support of National, ACT and New Zealand First, and against the votes of Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori. It closes enrolment 13 days before polling day rather than allowing people to enrol right up to the moment they vote.
In practice that means a hard deadline of midnight on Sunday 25 October this year. Advance voting opens the following day, 26 October, and election day is Saturday 7 November. Anyone who has moved house, changed their name or never enrolled at all needs to have that squared away before the October deadline, because there is no longer a way to fix it at the polling place. The full timetable is published on the Electoral Commission’s key dates page.
There is an earlier deadline that matters too. Voters on the Māori roll who want to switch to the general roll, or the other way around, have until midnight on 6 August to do it.
Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith has defended the change and rejected the suggestion that it will disenfranchise anyone who takes reasonable care. He described Hipkins’ warning as speculation, and made a pointed reply to the argument that Labour voters would be worse affected. “It seems odd for him to suggest his own voters are inherently more disorganised,” Goldsmith said. He also argued the old system had become unworkable, saying “late enrolments have placed too much strain on the system” and that “this is a significant, but necessary change, and New Zealanders have plenty of time to get organised”.
The strain argument is not invented. Special votes made up almost 21 percent of everything cast in 2023, some 603,257 votes, and each one has to be checked by hand before it can be counted. Around 450,000 people enrolled or updated their details during the 12 day advance voting period at that election, and another 110,000 did so on election day itself. That workload is a large part of why the final result took three weeks to arrive.
The counter argument is about who those late enrollers are. When the bill was going through, Ministry of Justice officials warned that “its impact on reducing special votes is uncertain, while its impact on democratic participation could be significant”. Then Attorney-General Judith Collins reported to Parliament that the bill appeared inconsistent with the right to vote affirmed in the Bill of Rights Act, writing that “a compelling justification is required to limit that right”. A Bill of Rights report of that kind does not stop a bill, but it is a formal signal that Parliament is being asked to do something it should think hard about.
Reporting during the bill’s passage put the Electoral Commission’s own estimate at roughly 55,000 party votes and 73,000 electorate votes that could be disallowed this year purely because the voter was not enrolled in time. Those are estimates rather than counts, and nobody will know the real figure until after 7 November, but they give a sense of the scale being argued about.
Goldsmith has pointed to the public information campaign as the answer, saying the Electoral Commission “will have plenty of time to run an education campaign to ensure people understand the new requirements”. The Commission has been running enrolment messaging since the middle of the year.
The wider point for voters is that the argument between the two men does not change what happens in October. Whatever Labour would do in a future term, the law as it stands on 7 November is the law that will decide whether a vote counts. Checking an enrolment takes a couple of minutes at vote.nz, and it is worth doing even for people who are certain they are already on the roll, because a house move since the last election is enough to put the details out of date.
Enrolment is only half of it. Working out which party actually matches your views is the other half, and if you want to compare the parties on policy rather than on personality, our voting tool lets you do that.
Both sides will keep making their case between now and November. Labour is betting that voters will see a shrinking window as an imposition. The Government is betting they will see a tidier count and a faster result. The evidence for who is right will only exist after the votes have been counted, or in the case of the votes that arrive too late, not counted.
Have you checked that your enrolment details are current, and do you think closing the roll 13 days out is reasonable or an unnecessary barrier? Let us know in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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