Election 2023: Why does it take so long to count special votes?

Labour leader Chris Hipkins (left) with National leader Christopher Luxon. Photo / NZME

Officials are right now counting the millions of votes cast in the 2023 general election, including the more than 500,000 special votes. It takes the Electoral Commission about three weeks to determine the official result - which may feel like a long time - but as election law expert Graeme Edgeler explains, there is a lot going on behind the scenes.

Voting in New Zealand is designed to be super easy. Anyone eligible can cast their vote from anywhere in the country during the voting period - or from overseas. You don’t need a birth certificate or photo ID - you don’t even need to be enrolled on election day.

This, Edgeler says, is the very reason it takes the commission three weeks to count the votes. In other countries, voters are given just one allocated voting location, or if they want to cast a special vote, they are required to do two or so weeks before the election.

“Why does counting the special vote take so long? In short, because we make voting easy in New Zealand,” he says.

“We made a choice as a country... that you should be able to vote anywhere in the country on election day itself and at any embassy or High Commission in the world on the day before - simply by rocking up and asking for voting papers and a form.”

In New Zealand, a special vote is the opposite of an “ordinary” vote. Your vote is “special” if your name was not on the electoral roll when you went to vote. This could be because you live in Wellington but were voting in a different part of the country, or because you haven’t enrolled yet.

Last election, in 2020, there were 504,621 special votes, including 62,787 overseas and dictation votes. This year, the Electoral Commission has estimated 567,000 special votes - around 20.2 per cent of total votes.

Between election day and when the official result is declared on November 3, officials aren’t just counting the special votes, Edgeler says. It is doing an official count of all votes cast in the election and they will do that twice.

But first, it conducts the “scrutiny of the rolls” - checking every physical copy of the election rolls and crossing off names. They will make sure your name was not also crossed off one of the rolls used in any of the other 50 voting places in your electorate.

In the few cases where a name has been crossed off twice, the commission will investigate. They could call the person to ask where and when they voted, or even visit.

“Police might visit if it looks like someone tried to vote pretending to be you. If your name is Dan Smith and the Dean Smith in your electorate didn’t vote, they might check with him if he voted, in case someone just accidentally crossed off the wrong line (imagine they get it right 99.999 per cent of the time - they’ll still make 20+ errors over the whole country).

“While this is happening, the enrolments team will be doing all the normal checks they do when someone enrols. We have the same levels (maybe higher) of voter roll integrity as other countries, but the difference is we make the Electoral Commission do this work instead [of] you, when you enrol.”

Public law expert Graeme Edgeler. Photo / NZ Herald

Sometimes the process is easy, Edgeler says, but for new enrolments it involves checking with the Births, Deaths and Marriages register, if the person said they were born in New Zealand, and with Immigration if they were born overseas.

Edgeler says other tasks include confirming which special voters are eligible to vote; transporting special votes cast in other areas of New Zealand back to the correct electorate; transporting votes cast overseas back to New Zealand and distributing them between the electorates; and checking overseas voters haven’t been away from New Zealand too long.

After the scrutiny of the rolls is done, the official count of ordinary votes can begin quickly, then the count of the allowed special votes, Edgeler said.

“Then they’ll count them all again. If there’s a disagreement between the first official count and the second official count for the votes cast at one voting place, they’ll count them a third time.

Edgeler says the commission will wait for the last possible day set by Parliament for special votes to be returned from overseas before announcing the official result.

“When you let people [vote as we do in New Zealand], the final important checks we have to do to be sure that only people who were entitled to vote got to vote have to be done after the election.

“And when you combine them with the official count, they’re done in about two weeks - which is amazing, if you think about it.”