Election 2026: Strong early voter turnout no reasons to shirk a democratic duty – Editorial
Election eve has arrived in New Zealand and it’s great to see early voter turnout has been strong.
About 1.25 million of the almost 3.8 million Kiwis enrolled to vote had already cast their ballot by Tuesday – a good chunk more than at the same point in the last general election.
But this is no reason for the rest to shirk this democratic duty.
This year, there will also be those who decide to become a voter too late and fall outside the newly curtailed enrolment period.
That goes against the principle that democracy is strongest when participation is broad.
Yet even when you could enrol right up until election day, hundreds of thousands of eligible Kiwi voters would still opt out every time. The enrolment rate at the 2023 election was 94.7%, the turnout was 74.17%. This year’s enrolment rate is 93.6%.
The adage goes that if you do not vote, you cannot complain.
The ratio of voting to complaining about politics in Aotearoa suggests, anecdotally at least, that this is widely ignored.
Griping about the Government means little, however, unless we follow through at the ballot box every three years by making two ticks at a cardboard booth.
The voters who overcome the alarming fatness of the orange pens to pick a party and a local representative decide what happens next in our country.
New Zealand is a representative democracy.
We, the people, rarely get to make the actual decisions; our only real say is in who will make the decisions for us.
That is a somewhat nebulous thing – elected representatives can lie, flip-flop or abandon pre-election commitments to secure a coalition deal – but it’s really all we have.
The polls predict a close and messy election, one that may challenge another tenet of our system of government – the “proportional part” of MMP.
No reader need look far for explainers about what an overhang is and how a perhaps unseemly level of encouragement for vote-splitting may engineer one in this election.
Suffice to say we might be breaking out the folding chairs to accommodate an expanded Parliament.
The polls also suggest that tomorrow night, all eyes may be on who Opportunity Party leader Qiulae Wong calls first.
It seems like a long time since anyone other than Winston Peters has worn the kingmaker crown.
It’s hard to imagine Wong giving media a ticking off about underestimating her party outside the Duke of Marlborough on Sunday, but perhaps she’ll oblige for tradition’s sake.
We might not know the full picture of the winners and losers in this election for weeks or even months.
The only people guaranteed to lose tomorrow are those who could vote but elect not to.
To quote The West Wing’s White House press secretary C.J. Cregg: “Decisions are made by those who show up.”