The overall turnout at the last election fell markedly. Less than 70 per cent of the voting age population cast a vote in 2011 compared with nearly 76 per cent in 2008.
If anything the circumstances which contributed to that outcome are even more entrenched.
The political parties naturally view non-voters as a potentially plentiful catchment to be exploited. Those parties forget they may be the very reason why people are no longer voting. That is especially the case with Labour. It shed around 180,000 votes in 2011. National, which picked up barely 5000 more votes than it did in 2008, was not the beneficiary of Labour's poor showing. Some of those votes obviously went to the Greens, while New Zealand First also likely gained from the exodus from Labour. But the figures suggest a good many simply did not vote at all.
Like other parties, Labour will be mobilising its volunteers for a massive street-level campaign to identify those non-voters sympathetic to its cause and ensure they make it to a polling booth on election day.
Labour is investing a lot of faith in being able to connect with former supporters at a local level when it has so obviously failed to do so at a national level.
Like other parties seeking to recapture some of that non-vote, Labour is handicapped however by three factors likely to drive even more people not to vote.
The first is that this election is not one marked by a mood for change. That alone is enough to keep voters at home. Second, many voters will have long decided the result is a foregone conclusion, so why bother to vote.
Third, while there is an increasing divergence by Labour away from the orthodox market economics practised by National, the former party's preference for a far more interventionist style of governing has yet to really penetrate voters' conspicuousness to any great extent. That is a slow process made even slower by almost weekly distractions from Labour's main messages.
What the voters see is both major parties trying to trump one another in the centre with policies which do not look vastly different.
John Key's overt pragmatism has exacerbated this trend. National's lack of a strong ally on the centre-right has forced him to moderate National's policy thrust. Labour's desire not to be hostage to the Greens was reflected in Helen Clark similarly avoiding doing too much which risked angering centre-ground voters who kept her in power for nine years.
In short, MMP may bear some responsibility in depressing turnout. It cannot be blamed alone, however, for the abysmal turnout of younger voters.
According to official survey data, around a quarter of those aged between 18 and 24 did not enroll to vote at the 2011 election.
It is estimated that around 42 per cent of those in that age band did not vote. The excuses ran from the mundane - work and other commitments - to "could not be bothered to vote". For some who have no trust in politicians or did not like any of the party leaders, not voting could be defended as a stand on principle.
Otherwise, non voters fall into two broad categories - those who are indifferent to politics and those who find voting an inconvenience.
Somewhat contrary to the Massey survey findings, less than 2 per cent of non-voters cited the location of polling places as the reason for not casting a ballot.
Seeing turnout levels as coming within its ambit but with little spare cash to do much about it, the Electoral Commission has been developing a "voter participation strategy" which it hopes will spark a national discussion.
It is suggesting that voter education programmes be expanded in schools to stop the increasing drift of younger generations into what for many will become a habit of non-voting. It is too little, too late.
Meanwhile, political parties strive to come up with the magic bullet policy-wise which will have young voters flocking to the polling booths.
But the plague of indifference to things political will not be cured by supposed solutions handed down from on high.
The frustration of the young is that politics is an old people's game - and is likely to remain so until the baby-boom generation dies off.
In the meantime, that older generation will continue to use its weight in numbers to get more and more resources out of taxes paid by a smaller and smaller workforce.
While younger generations are already saddled with student loans and shut out of the housing market, inter-generational warfare has yet to break out.
When that happens, the young will find their own leaders, ideas and actions - in short, their voice - from within their population cohort, not someone imposed on them from outside by some other variation of a stranded German with pots of money.
The last great bout of inter-generational warfare occurred against the backdrop of rising living standards in the prosperous 1960s.
Reluctant as one is to quote a long-dead hippie, Jerry Rubin was literally in the front-line of the battle between radical activists and the American political establishment.
His advice to the young? Don't trust anyone over 30. It is advice they have already taken to heart, at least when it comes to politicians supposedly bearing gifts.
