REPORT BY NZ OUTDOORS PARTY to the Justice Committee for the 2023 Election

REPORT BY NZ OUTDOORS PARTY to the Justice Committee for the 2023 Election.

Prepared by Tracy Livingston – B. Applied Sc (Osteopathy) tracy.livingston@outdoorsparty.co.nz Ph 027 212 8827

This submission is lodged by the NZ OUTDOORS  AND FREEDOM PARTY, a registered political party under the Electoral Act.

The OUTDOORS AND FREEDOM PARTY promotes:

· democracy where people play an active role in decision making, knowing their views are valued and will be listened to.

· freedom from excessive government and international interference in the lives of New Zealanders;

· more self-sufficiency for New Zealand and New Zealanders,

· better care of our water, land, soil, wildlife and of our people.

· natural and organic regenerative approaches to agriculture to promote community wellbeing and thriving rural communities and local businesses.

· “localism” to encourage and empower local people to support their local communities and have an active role in decision which affect the health and wellbeing of their community;

· food and body sovereignty;

· transparent representation and informed decision making which will promote a long-term vision for protecting and promoting the interests of all New Zealanders, our children and grandchildren.

The Outdoors & Freedom Party made a report on the 2020 General Election, however, pretty much the same problems were still there in the 2023 GE. We will not repeat the previous report, but will include it here so the new select committee understands some of our concerns in the 2020 General Election and will make the necessary changes for future. https://www.parliament.nz/resource/en-NZ/53SCJU_EVI_104172_JU1281/630253c8e98f4d9b3939f37e3c3974957f3ca79a

It’s true that small changes are made at three yearly intervals and we can’t really expect parliamentarians to create changes that might affect their party’s chance to relinquish any power. However, for elections to be the democratic process that they are meant to be, the issues we raise as a political party need both dealing with as they arise (by the EC) and later by this select committee during the inquiry process. Our observation of politics is that “the can gets kicked down the road’ as long as possible which is disheartening for the minor parties who are most affected by the inequality embedded in the system. We hope the current select committee has commitment to fairness and the democratic process.

“s14 of NZ Bill of Rights protects a free and fair election

and must override any arbitrary rules”

Sue Grey, co-leader NZ Outdoors & Freedom Party

Electoral Commission Functions to ensure

 “confidence in the NZ Electoral Process”

Government Broadcast Allocations

The NZ Outdoors and Freedom Party and Freedom NZ felt they had no choice but to file High Court proceedings to challenge unfair broadcasting allocations. The High Court agreed with many of the concerns raised but determined it was for parliament to amend the law.

Ref: NZ Outdoors and Freedom Party and others v Electoral Commission [ 2023,] NZHC 1823

The EC job is to allocate funding to parties for election broadcasting. The manner that they do this is obviously unfair to most New Zealanders. Examples as follows

1. Sue Grey, co-leader of the NZ O&F Outdoors Party received 4.9% of the vote count in the Tauranga bi-election. This should have meant that the NZ O&F Party received an appropriate percentage allocation for the General Election.
   1. The large parties that are already well known, receive more funding than those that are not
   1. Parties that are already in parliament can use parliamentary funding in their campaigns, before “campaign period’ starts. This is obviously seen by letters turning up in the mail just before election period, ‘introducing’ the current MP, social media adverts etc. There needs to be a longer time frame in place that MP’s can not use parliamentary funding to kick start their election campaigns.
   1. Prof Claire Robinson made excellent points in her 2020 submission on “Minor party Broadcast Allocation funding” that need urgently to be addressed which highlights academics also note the inequality. https://www.parliament.nz/resource/en-NZ/53SCJU_EVI_104172_JU1241/e4e5bcf63ca787648597210fee49596804cc3f28 

As a practical solution, the OFP strongly recommends and supports

1. That the select committee ensures the Electoral Commission interprets the Act correctly to ensure fair allocation of broadcast funding.
2. The Electoral Commission arrange the use of the Parliament TV channel for all registered parties to share policies ahead of each election.
3. The Electoral Commission would be charged with creating and maintaining a policy
   comparison template website in order to present policy in the most meaningful
   way to voters. The Electoral Commission creates the spreadsheet comparing and contrasting policies and includes all the general and specialised policies of a registered party. The EC receives all that data four months before the election to collate and ensure inclusion and opportunity and ease of engagement for voters. This allows people to focus debate on policy not personality. After a complete electoral term, we will be able to compare the current practices with the original policies, providing an invaluable ‘score card’ for the incumbent government and allowing voters to see just what has and hasn’t been achieved.  These changes to our system would lead to increased public debate and engagement with politics and better informed voting. The Electoral Commission be THE organisation that has all that data in one place, creates the “GO TO” website, not leaving the job to agenda driven private companies and corporations.
4. Allocated broadcasting time for each party be used to explain and debate policy.
5. The Electoral Commission needs ensure each political party gets essentially the same media coverage as each other party – for example; the same time that the Prime Minister gets to speak on National Radio should be balanced by the same time given to the leaders of other registered political parties. Main stream media – Government owned TV and radio stations and newspapers should give balanced time and page space to all parties without preference given to one or other party and candidates and without bias.  

Changes to “the threshold”:

Way back in 2012 the review made these recommendations. Why has it still not happened? Time for this committee to ensure that kiwis get representation in parliament!

TV debates and “invisible parties”: still unresolved

Emerging parties were still refused the opportunity to be engaged in TV debates or any major media engagement as well as local/private “meet the candidate” meetings. (see our 2020 submission for the issues and possible solutions)

Unjust media coverage: Still unresolved 

The lack of media coverage of minor parties during an election is leaving a large part of the community feeling completely unrepresented. If it is the EC’s job to encourage new Zealanders to vote, then giving all parties exposure to a wider audience than just their membership means that people are more likely to vote. (see our 2020 submission for the issues and possible solutions)

Political Donations: 

Donation rules still need to be updated and improved to support the democratic process and remove the obvious “those with the deepest pockets win elections and hence control the country” bias.

Recommendations:

1) only individuals, New Zealand citizens or permanent residents, and party members can donate to a political party

2) individuals can only be the member of one party which prevents ‘investing’ in two or three opposing parties.

3) Set a limit, fairly low, to the amount that can be donated. This encourages people to be involved in politics by supporting their party and reduces “big money” influence in our election results.

Referenda: still an issue (see our 2020 submission for the issues and possible solutions)

 and ALCP 2020 submission.

Roadside Signs: still an issue (see our 2020 submission for the issues and possible solutions)

Misuse of taxpayer funds for parliamentarians during an election cycle: still an issue (see our 2020 and 2023 + TOP submission and Prof Robinsons submission)

Computers handling voting data

The Electoral Act 1993 is outdated, written without any references to manual or computer handling of voting data. Still an issue from 2020 election.

1) There are no references to a means to audit/compare tabulated election data to the original data.

2) There is no defined way to audit the tabulating programs on the computer.

3) The computer is reporting voter place data to the Television and public in ‘real time’ on voting day so is ‘live’ on the internet and at great risk of being hacked.

4) The “Official count”, done the day following the election, does not in any way validate the vote counts shown on the TV. It is compartmentalised and only compares ballot counts in a single voting place to the preliminary count of that voting place.

These are all very concerning failures of the process.

A critical flaw is that there is no way to check that the vote counts in the electorate polling places on voting day (the sum of many “Certificate of results” counts generated by the polling places) is reflected in the final results published. The count relies totally on tabulation within the Electoral Management Computer. The integrity of the process, from voting to publishing results, does not allow a manual audit trail. The process appears to impede any audit, stop observational assessments to be made on voting trends and allow easy access (at many stages) to the voting information.

Solution:

There needs to be an ability to manually compare (and sum) the many “Certificate of Results” counts generated by the polling places to the “spread sheet” compiled electronically and printed off from the “Election Management System” (CATALYST computer). The information on each electorate’s many “Certificate of Results” forms should match that recorded on the lines of the computer generated spreadsheet.

There will then be transparency to enable comparison of the totals calculated from the “Certificate of Results” to the “Official Results Certificate” for each electorate. If they do not correlate, it should trigger a forensic audit of the actual ballots by an independent agency.

The election process should also be subject to an independent manual external audit to ensure transparency in the election process.

Mistakes with the Maori Role:

Young Māori voters who had enrolled on the Maori Role, arrive to vote, were given general roll voting papers, when they told polling booth volunteers that they have been incorrectly put on the General Role are told that they have to make a Special Vote. This is not a one off situation, it happened enough for it to have created a social media storm. How did all these young voters be moved off the role they signed up on, to the role they did not sign up on? I read somewhere that Catalyst Software maintains the roles of the New Zealand voters. They may not be the most reliable organization to do this based on their performance.

Special Votes:

Quote from someone working in a voting place. “OMG every second vote is a special vote. The whole online electoral role was down for much of the day” The feedback we got was that the long waits meant many people just gave up and walked away. Again is this a Catalyst problem?

Mistake closing down local Election Commission offices:

EC local office employees shared their concerns that local EC offices closing down was going to cause major issues at voting time, which it did as people who thought they were enrolled were not, papers went to wrong addresses and so on.  EC needs to reinstate local Electoral offices to maintain a functional electoral role as locals are connected to and know their rohe.

Digital voting: The current pen and paper method of voting should remain in place. Digital booths or online voting should not be used in elections in the future.

Second Choice Party Vote:

This is a potentially simple solution to the “vote wasting” concern many voters experience. This would make it easier to vote for a ‘minor party’ knowing that you had a back-up if your first preference did not make the threshold. There is a minor change to the voting paper (see below) and a slightly

more complicated vote count process, but the benefits to both parties and voters makes this worthwhile. It may well be that no changes to the Act are required to allow this ‘second choice vote’. This submission was made last election and we recommend the committee revisits this. https://www.parliament.nz/resource/en-NZ/53SCJU_EVI_104172_JU1395/ac6be69dc9c64d4d2bb5ce70c7dd2f0f88e70799 

Advertising:

We’d like to remind the Select Committee of Prof Claire Robinson’s excellent submission from the 2020 Election, raising advertising abuses that are still unresolved: https://www.parliament.nz/resource/en-NZ/53SCJU_EVI_104172_JU1241/e4e5bcf63ca787648597210fee49596804cc3f28 

Support for:

We’d also like to note that we support the 2020 Submissions to the Justice Committee and request the select committee revisit and review recommendations suggested by TOP – The Opportunities Party: https://www.parliament.nz/resource/en-NZ/53SCJU_EVI_104172_JU1330/6d188fa8f369177bd4d60c0a69727404eb8f2a6c

The NZOF Party gives notice that it would like to be heard in support of this submission.

We reserve the right to make a supplementary submission.

Tracy Livingston

For The New Zealand Outdoors Party