John MacDonald: Isn't enrolling on election day better than not voting at all?

Election Day is like Christmas Day, with some of us not getting ourselves organised until the very last minute - even though we’ve known for ages that it’s happening.  

Christmas day is never sprung on us. We know it happens every 12 months, but there’s a lot of last-minute panicking, isn’t there?  

We get even more warning with Election Day. We know it happens every three years, but there's the same last-minute rush.  

Especially for the 110,000 people who were in the last-minute camp at the last election, enrolling to vote on the same day they voted.  

But the Government’s not having any more of that and, as part of its changes to the way elections are run, it’s doing away with same-day enrolment. Which I think is a mistake.  

But ACT MP Todd Stephenson is loving it, saying: “It’s outrageous that someone completely disengaged and lazy can rock up to the voting booth, get registered there and then, and then vote to tax other people's money away.”  

But he’s missing the point completely, because isn’t it brilliant that more than 100,000 people got to vote in the last election because they could enrol on the day?  

Isn’t it the ones who didn’t vote at all who are the lazy ones?  

The Government’s missing the point too. Because instead of penalising voters because it’s system can’t cope with last minute enrolments, it should be coming up with a system that can cope.  

It should be building a system that enables same day enrolment instead of getting rid of it.  

What it’s doing is effectively reversing something that was brought in for the 2020 election by the previous government. But it's going even further than just reversing what Labour did, and people are going to have to be enrolled and have their details up to date before the 12 days of advance voting begins.  

The Government says it’s making the changes so the votes can be counted quicker. So that we get a result quicker, and so the politicians can get on with doing coalition deals.   

But that’s just an excuse for not putting in the effort to come up with a better system to count the votes. And I’m not the only one saying that today either.  

Electoral law expert Graeme Edgeler is pouring cold water on it as well, saying there’s nothing stopping the politicians who look like they've been elected from beginning coalition negotiations before the final special votes are counted.  

He says the final results can change by one or two seats, but nothing dramatic, and he says, “the time delay just doesn't seem like a particularly good reason for this."  

As for one of the other changes it’s making —delivering on its promise to bring-in a total ban on prisoners voting— that gets a thumbs down from me too.  

Again, it’s getting rid of something brought in by the previous government: voting rights for prisoners serving sentences of less than three years. Which is a mistake because I see a prisoner being able to vote as a way of keeping them engaged with the outside world.  

You might recall a few months back, Sir Ron Young was finishing up as head of the Parole Board and he was saying that the reoffending rate for prisoners who serve short prison terms of two to three years is higher than those inside for longer.   

That’s because they have way less opportunities to get themselves rehabilitated and they end up spending a lot of their time behind bars hanging out with serious crims.  

So he was advocating for keeping these prisoners more engaged with the outside world, and I see voting rights as a way of doing that.  

What’s more, how does a prisoner serving two years being allowed to vote affect you? Answer: it doesn’t. It has no impact on you and no impact on me. 

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