More attempted voter suppression from National

Back in July, National introduced its Electoral Amendment Bill, containing the widest attack on the right to vote seen in Aotearoa. Rather than following the long-standing policy of wanting people to cote and so making it easy for them, National wanted to make it harder - and especially harder for people less likely to vote for them. And while they clearly felt they couldn't get away with American bullshit like voter ID, they went for widespread voter suppression by closing the roll early. The supposed justification for this was that it would lead to a quicker vote count, but the Electoral Commission has said that's bullshit. The real reason is to eliminate left voters from the voting pool and so rig the election in their favour - just like their American masters do.

That stinks, its undemocratic, and it will destroy public faith in free and fair elections. And now we find out that it could have been even worse: National wanted to prevent people from voting outside their electorates completely:

Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith marked the idea of banning people from voting when outside of their electorate “worth exploring” - before ultimately not pursuing it.

This would stop anyone who was working, studying, or on holiday outside of their electorate during the election from casting a vote.

Goldsmith was exploring ideas for cutting down on the number of “special” votes in order to speed up the final count of votes.

You might think that the long advance-voting period would mitigate this, and those expecting to be away on holiday or business could just vote earlier. But the empirical evidence from the last few elections shows that that's not the case: we still get plenty of special votes from those who are casually out of their electorates on election day. Meanwhile, there's a significant group which would be effectively disenfranchised by the move: students. Lots of them enrol when living with their parents, then move away to university, and never update because the move is "temporary" - meaning they are registered in a completely different electorate to the one they actually live in. And this group also tends not to back the current government. So its partisan voter suppression in the name of "efficiency".

Fortunately, they didn't go through with it. But the fact they even considered it shows how desperate National is to rig the election and prevent their enemies from voting - and how convinced they are that they will lose if everyone gets to vote.

We need to defend our democracy from these tyrants. And that starts by throwing them out on their arses next year. But we also clearly need greater constitutional protections for electoral law, to prevent this sort of fuckery in future. And if National won't agree to add further clauses to the reserved provisions, then the next government should push them through by referendum.