Judges and minister briefed after instances of double voting found in election result

The Electoral Commission was under pressure to deliver a final result. Photo / Bevan Conley

Staffing challenges, lax checking processes, budget pressure and an unexpected surge in late enrolments are to blame for counting errors at last year’s election, according to a report published today by the Auditor-General, John Ryan.

An error was first picked up by the NZ Herald when it was reviewing results. That error led to further errors being spotted and amended. The Auditor-General, in reviewing the result, thinks there are likely further problems, including a number of “dual votes” (instances where someone may have voted twice) that have not been extracted from the final electoral tally.

The number of these votes is very small, however, and remedying them would not lead to any change in the final outcome of the election or races in any electorates. Small errors are inevitable during an election. Nevertheless, the Electoral Commission has briefed the Minister of Justice Paul Goldsmith, the Ministry of Justice and members of the judiciary responsible for overseeing recounts.

“As a result of questions we asked, we identified other potential errors in the final results due to some apparent dual votes not being removed in keeping with instructions,” the Auditor-General said.

“Mistakes happened because some ballots were misplaced, which led to incorrect counting, and because some people made data entry errors or did not do the checks that were required. “Although there was a relatively small number of errors, which did not affect the overall outcome, small errors can make a difference,” the report said.

The Commission has accepted the report. Chief Electoral Officer Karl Le Quesne offered his assurance that “none of these errors would have affected the outcome in an electorate or for the party vote”.

“There will always be errors in a predominantly manual process and we need to make sure our processes and controls pick them up effectively,” he said.

“These were errors made by people under pressure. While the errors were too small to affect the results, we deeply regret they occurred. Our priority is improving the systems and controls we have in place and continuing to deliver elections with integrity,” he said.

The Auditor-General has recommended updating quality assurance checks, reviewing processes, reviewing the number of people required to hold an election and the hardware and technology requirements.

While the report repeatedly points to the strain that new rules allowing late same-day enrolments has placed on the Electoral Commission, it is silent on whether the Government should consider reverting to the system that existed before the 2020 election, which closed off enrolments at midnight the day before election day.

The last Labour Government changed the rules in its first term with the support of the Greens and NZ First. The current Government, including NZ First, has been critical of the change and open minded about reverting back to the old model.

This could have a negative impact on voter turnout - although with only two elections under the new system, including one fought during pandemic-blighted 2020, the success or failure of the new rules is unclear.

The report said almost 454,000 people enrolled in the two weeks before the election, including about 110,000 on election day - a 46 per cent increase on the number of enrolments in the fortnight before the 2020 election.

The report said this was “significantly” more than the commission had expected in its modelling.

“There were not enough staff to process the volume of election-day enrolments in the time allowed for this to be completed,” the report said.

About 600,000 special votes were also cast, 100,000 more than in the 2020 election. These take 10 times longer to process than ordinary votes.

Time constraints put pressure on the commission’s staff to check the results before publishing a final tally. The Auditor-General was understanding of this pressure, because the commission has a statutory requirement to deliver final results by a deadline, rather than when the commission is satisfied they are ready.

The pressure meant quality checks because “those checks were either not done or not done with the rigour they required”.

Checks are meant to occur both at the level of individual electorates and at the national office, where the final tally is recorded. The Auditor-General found that in some cases, electorates did a poor job of quality assurance because they thought the national office would pick up problems, while the national office did a poor job because it relied on thinking quality assurance had taken place at the electorate level.

The Electoral Commission is tasked with investigating dual votes, which occur when someone has voted twice. This can only be done when special votes are processed, because the commission needs to be able to see the total pool of votes before seeing whether anyone has voted twice.

This process was rushed in 2023, meaning the commission asked electorate staff to “resolve” any dual votes “based on the best information they had at that time”, removing any apparent dual votes from the tally.

That instruction was given at 5.22pm the evening before the official result was due to be announced and was not “universally implemented, meaning that some apparent dual votes were included in the official results”.

The commission said that even if the instruction to remove apparent dual votes had been followed completely, it would not have resulted in a different outcome in any electorates.

“The commission notified the Chief District Court Judge and the three judges who oversaw judicial recounts and provided a briefing. The judges acknowledged the information provided. They noted that there was nothing they could have done differently based on the information given to them at the time of the recount, that they no longer had a role to play, and that they have not asked the commission to take further action.

“The commission has also notified the minister and the Secretary for Justice,” the report said.

The Electoral Commission’s ranks swell from about 170 fulltime equivalent staff to 22,000 during an election period. This puts pressure on the commission to both find enough staff, which was difficult last election, probably due to the low unemployment rate, and to train the staff adequately.

The commission may also be under-resourced for the changes made in 2020 allowing same-day enrolment. The level of the commission’s funding for the next election will be decided in the May 2024 Budget, which will be published at the end of this month.

The Auditor-General floated the idea of giving electoral agencies “budgetary independence”. Currently, the Electoral Commission must compete with everything from Health and Education to Corrections for money in the Budget.

Overseas, in New South Wales in Australia and British Columbia in Canada, electoral agencies have their budgets set with a greater degree of independence.

The Auditor-General said Cabinet “asked officials to provide further advice on sustainable funding models for the Electoral Commission” in 2019, but dropped the idea due to the pandemic.

Thomas Coughlan is Deputy Political Editor and covers politics from Parliament. He has worked for the Herald since 2021 and has worked in the press gallery since 2018.