Its a law like gravity: whenever a right-wing government is elected, they start attacking democracy. And now, after talking to their Republican and Tory and Fidesz chums at the International Democracy Union forum in Wellington, National is doing it here, announcing plans to remove election-day enrolment. Or, to put it another way, to stop 110,000 people - almost 4% of last year's turnout - from voting. These people are mostly people who thought they were on the roll, and didn't realise they'd been removed - so, not exactly culpable. And with renters forced to move increasingly frequently so their landleeches can raise the rent and steal their bond, you can draw some obvious conclusions about who these voters might be, and why National, the party of landleeches, wouldn't want them to vote.
Naked partisan reasons aside, the actual problem here is that the Electoral Commission weirdly didn't expect such a large number of people to have to enrol on election day, and so didn't have enough staff to process them all quickly. But the proper solution to that in a democracy is to resource them properly. The fact that National instinctively moves to stop people voting tells us that they don't want us to be a democracy - at least, not one which includes everyone.
