Barely half of New Zealand’s youngest eligible voters are on the electoral roll, with the enrolment rate for 18 to 24 year olds falling to 53 percent at the end of June, three months out from the general election on 7 November.
The figure, reported by RNZ, continues a slide that has now run through six consecutive election years. In 2011, 70 percent of 18 to 24 year olds were enrolled by the end of June. By 2023 that had dropped to 60 percent. This year it is 53 percent, which means close to half the age group currently has no way to cast a vote that counts.
The rest of the country is moving in the opposite direction. Across all age groups, 89 percent of eligible New Zealanders are enrolled, which is up on the past two election years. Older voters are signing up in greater numbers while the youngest ones drift further off the roll.
That divergence matters more this year than it ever has, because the safety net that used to catch late enrollers has been removed. Under the Electoral Amendment Act 2025, most of which took effect in December, people can no longer enrol at the same time as they vote. Enrolment now closes 13 days before polling day, at midnight on Sunday 25 October, the day before advance voting opens. Miss that and you are out, no matter how motivated you are by the last fortnight of the campaign.
The scale of what has changed is easy to underestimate. At the 2023 election the Electoral Commission processed roughly 450,000 enrolments or enrolment updates during the voting period, including about 110,000 on election day itself. Those late enrollers were disproportionately young, renting and recently shifted house, which is exactly the group sitting at 53 percent today. The Government’s argument for the change, set out by the Ministry of Justice, was administrative. Late enrolments were slowing the count, which stretched from two weeks in earlier elections to three in 2023, and the new deadline is meant to pull that back.
What the enrolment figures do not explain is why so many young people are staying away in the first place. Students at Victoria University of Wellington, both enrolled and not, told RNZ they and their friends felt apathetic and at times nihilistic about the whole exercise, and that voting would not change anything. One summed it up bluntly, saying “Things are screwed anyway, why try?”
The Electoral Commission says it is doing what it can. Strategic engagement and partnerships director Shane Whitfield said the commission was “making sure that we’re available in communities and places and spaces where young people are, so that they can have that opportunity to have their voices heard”. That means social media, radio and television campaigns, along with a physical presence at sports clubs, schools, universities, polytechs and shopping malls.
AUT political scientist Julienne Molineaux argues the fix has to start earlier, and that the country should lower the voting age to 16 and make civics education compulsory in schools. Her reasoning is that 16 year olds are still in classrooms, still in a setting where someone can walk them through how the system works, while 18 to 24 year olds are scattered across flats, workplaces, campuses and overseas. “This sounds counterintuitive to solving youth enrolment problems, but young people are still at school at 16, most of them are,” she said.
Molineaux is also unconvinced that automatic enrolment, an idea that surfaces regularly as the obvious technical answer, would achieve much on its own. “So if it happens automatically, the people who are currently disengaged would still be disengaged,” she said. “They would just be disengaged and enrolled.” Her view is that the small act of enrolling is itself part of what pulls someone into voting, and that removing the step removes the moment of commitment along with it.
The politicians, unsurprisingly, all want the same outcome and disagree about the cause. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon put the responsibility partly back on young people themselves, saying “If you’re unhappy with the system, we need young people to come into politics and to engage with democracy and the political system”. Labour’s Kieran McAnulty said his party was aiming to draw younger voters in through what it offers, saying “Certainly that’s our intention with our policy offering and how we’re going to be conducting the campaign”. Greens co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick was characteristically blunt, saying “Basically, if you don’t do politics, politics is going to do you”.
There is a practical point buried under the rhetoric. On current numbers, close to half of everyone aged 18 to 24 in this country will be shut out of the November election unless something shifts between now and late October. Turnout among enrolled young voters is already lower than for other age groups, so the enrolment gap compounds a participation gap that was there anyway. Policy on housing, student debt, KiwiSaver settings, climate and the job market gets written by governments elected largely by people who are not affected by those decisions in the same way.
Enrolling takes a few minutes at vote.nz and needs a driver licence, passport or RealMe login, or a paper form if none of those work. Anyone who has moved house since 2023 needs to update their details as well, because a vote cast in the wrong electorate creates exactly the sort of special vote the new rules were designed to reduce.
If you want to work out where the parties actually stand before you decide whether it is worth the effort, our voting tool lets you compare policies across the main parties on the issues you care about.
Do you think lowering the voting age or compulsory civics in schools would make a difference, or is the problem something else entirely? Have your say 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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