Improving access to general elections for people with disabilities

The three electoral agencies are currently consulting on a 2008 general election disability action plan.

The aim of this work is to improve access to:

• the enrolment process for people with disabilities, so they can easily enrol and keep their details up to date
• information about MMP and the election, so people with disabilities know what the two ticks are for
• voting so wherever possible people with disabilities can vote independently and in secret without experiencing barriers.

A consultation document is now open for submission, with feedback due by midday on Friday, 8 December.

Register now for Māori electoral participation research conference

First-in, first-served for the fewer than 20 places remaining at the free, Friday, 8 December conference where the findings of four research projects for the Electoral Commission will be unveiled by the reports’ authors and discussed by participants.  Māori Land Court Chief Judge Joe Williams, an electoral commissioner, will chair the day which commission chief executive Helena Catt predicts will be valuable to: politicians and parties; iwi, communities and non-governmental organisations; social marketing, local and central government agencies; and the news media.

63,000 people removed from updated electoral rolls

Updated electoral rolls reveal that 63,089 people – or the equivalent of all the residents in Whangarei and Ashburton - have been removed from the rolls in the past year because they haven’t kept their details up-to-date.  The Electoral Enrolment Centre has released for public display the first set of updated electoral rolls since the last election.  They include changes since the 2005 general election and this year’s Maori Electoral Option.  The latest rolls are on display now at PostShops, public libraries, court houses and Registrars of Electors offices around the country for people to check their details.  Over the past 12 months, the electoral roll has had a net increase of 39,990 people.  2,887,386 people or 94.8% of the estimated eligible population are now enrolled to vote.

Pacific civic educators’ network established

A network of Pacific civic educators is being established following a workshop held in Suva last month involving participants from six countries.  Funded by the United Nations Development Programme (with the support of NZAID and AusAID) and the European Union, and organised by the University of the South Pacific and the NZ Electoral Commission, the workshop built up a picture of civic education and best practice in the Pacific with the stimulus of seven case studies presented by participants.  Lead facilitator Helena Catt says the meeting agreed that a network would be useful and discussed how it could best work and develop (with a web presence being an early initiative).  E-mail helena@elections.govt.nz if you want to be kept in touch with developments.

Electoral Commission annual report published this week

The Electoral Commission’s annual report for the year ended 30 June 2006 will be presented to the House of Representatives this week with election-related issues featuring prominently.  The report joins the statement of intent as the commission’s current key documents of accountability.

New Zealand voter motivation trial reported

Helena Catt presented a paper on the Electoral Commission’s experiment to encourage the newly enrolled to vote, at the annual Australasian Political Studies Association (APSA) conference in Newcastle, NSW, held in September.  Other papers in the Australian and New Zealand politics stream are also available at.  A number of these papers advocate compulsory voting, in particular those by Dr Lisa Hill.  There are also papers or abstracts from the panel on youth participation.

UK research of interest to NZ

The UK Electoral Commission has published two reports of interest to New Zealand: one on attitudes towards party funding and the other testing Scottish understanding of MMP (they call it AMS).

Qualitative research took groups (25 to 30) participants through a day of discussion and information on party finance.  The researchers found that most participants had misconceptions about parties and funding.  Through discussion participants agreed on a small number of guiding principles that they thought should be met by any reformed funding system: transparency; accountability; greater limits and control on party spending; fairness for all parties irrespective of size.

Research into understanding of the electoral systems used in Scotland (MMP for Parliament and STV for the first time for local body elections) shows low levels of understanding of both systems alongside good understanding of the idea of proportional representation. Most felt that filling in the ballot paper was easy but understanding how votes were used was hard.  In Scotland there was an information campaign on AMS at their first election (1999) but not the second (2003) and the research shows a drop in objective knowledge leading to the conclusion that ‘it would appear that voters need reminding of how the system works at each and every election; they cannot necessarily be assumed to remember how it works from last time around’ (p43).

(The above links are to html pages, however be aware that downloading the .pdf reports takes time due to high resolution graphics.)

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