About 115,000 New Zealanders are sitting on the dormant electoral roll with less than three months until the general election, and one of them turned out to be a sitting member of Parliament.
Labour MP Willow-Jean Prime told RNZ she found out by chance in June that she had been shifted off the main roll earlier in the year. She checked her enrolment online and was told she was not currently enrolled, wording she described as “misleading”. She had not moved house, and said her details were correct every time she looked.
“I did what they told me to do, and every time I went on there, my details were correct. I hadn’t moved,” Prime said. She said the whole situation felt “a bit messy”.
The dormant roll is not a punishment and it is not a deletion. It is where the Electoral Commission parks voters it can no longer reach. The usual trigger is mail. If something posted to an enrolled address comes back undeliverable, the commission tries the email address or mobile number it holds and asks the voter to confirm where they live. If nothing comes back after four weeks, the voter is taken off the main roll and put on the dormant one. After three years of failed contact, they are removed from the roll altogether.
Chief Electoral Officer Karl le Quesne, who released the 115,000 figure on Monday, described the dormant roll as a “safety net”. The number is about 25 percent lower than at the same point in the 2023 election cycle, which he said was still “not good enough”.
In most years being on the dormant roll would be an inconvenience rather than a problem. Dormant voters can still vote. They simply do not appear on the printed roll at the voting place, so staff hand them a special declaration vote instead, and they are not posted an EasyVote card in advance. This year the stakes are higher, because the rules around the deadline have changed and there is no longer a safety valve on election day.
Under the Electoral Amendment Act 2025, enrolling and voting on the same day is gone. Anyone who is not enrolled by Sunday 25 October will not have a vote counted, full stop. At the last election about 110,000 people enrolled on election day itself. Le Quesne has been blunt about what that means now.
“The law has changed and if you’re not enrolled by 25 October, your vote won’t be counted,” he said at the launch of the commission’s enrolment advertising campaign on Monday. “If there’s any doubt at all we will offer a special vote, but I actually think a lot of people when they realise ‘I’m not enrolled, my vote won’t be counted’, they’ll decide ‘okay, well, I’m not going to vote this time’.”
He is also pushing an earlier date. Voters who confirm their address by 4 October make it onto the printed roll, get an EasyVote card in the post and have a much simpler time at the voting place. Advance voting opens on 26 October and election day is Saturday 7 November.
That is the practical risk for the 115,000. Someone who is told online that they are not enrolled, who does not realise the dormant roll is a fixable status, may conclude the election is closed to them and stay home. Prime said that was exactly her worry, that people in her position “might not bother to vote at all”.
The Electoral Commission says Prime’s experience was not typical. Deputy chief executive for operations Anusha Guler told RNZ it would be “unusual” for someone to be asked to update their details when they had not moved house, and encouraged anyone in that position to ring the commission on 0800 36 76 56. Guler said the main reason people end up dormant is a house move that never got reported. A reminder text is due to go out in late August to everyone on the dormant roll for whom the commission holds a mobile number.
Fixing it is quick. Confirming an address through vote.nz or filling in an enrolment form puts a voter straight back on the main roll.
Prime also raised the Māori roll figures. About 5000 voters of Māori descent have been moved onto the dormant roll since the end of March. “It’s hugely disappointing that thousands of Māori voters have been moved to the dormant roll, potentially without knowing and through no fault of their own,” she said.
The dormant roll sits inside a bigger enrolment problem. Roughly 3.6 million people are enrolled, about 89 percent of those eligible, and commission board chair Simon Moore called that “not bad, but we don’t think it’s good enough”. Around 440,000 eligible people are not on the roll at all, and about 200,000 of those are aged 18 to 25, a group whose enrolment rate has fallen to 53 percent.
The enrolment deadline is one of the sharper political fault lines of this campaign. The Government argues the change speeds up the count, which ran to three weeks in 2023, and the commission expects to save about three days of counting by no longer processing election day enrolments. Labour has promised to restore election day enrolment if it wins in November.
For voters, the argument matters less than the calendar. Anyone who has moved house since the last election, or who has not had post from the Electoral Commission in a while, has until 25 October to sort it out, and until 4 October to make it easy. If you are still working out where the parties stand before you vote, our voting tool compares them policy by policy.
Have you checked your enrolment recently, or found yourself on the dormant roll without knowing it? Tell us 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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