OPINION: Michael Swanson
On Friday I sat down with the Vote2026 Team at the University of Otago, a student-produced series of interviews with politicians and political commentators running in the lead-up to the 2026 election. One of the things we spent a good chunk of time on was low voter turnout amongst young people, an issue that keeps resurfacing every election cycle without ever really being solved. It felt worth setting some thoughts down properly.
The scale of the problem
The numbers this year are stark. As of late July, according to the Electoral Commission, only around 53-54% of 18 to 24 year old’s were enrolled to vote. To put that in context, 70% of that age group was enrolled at the equivalent point in 2011, and even by 2023 it had only slipped to 60%. That’s a fifteen-year slide, and it’s accelerating rather than levelling off.
Enrolment is only half the story. Being enrolled is compulsory in New Zealand, but actually turning up to vote is not, and there’s a second gap on top of the first. RNZ spoke to students at Victoria University this year who described feeling apathetic and nihilistic about the whole process, with one line that stuck with me: “things are screwed anyway, why try?” That kind of resignation is hard to argue someone out of with a pamphlet.
There’s also a genuine cost to this beyond the abstract idea of “democratic participation.” As Newswire pointed out, policy on housing, student debt, KiwiSaver settings, climate and the job market ends up being written largely by governments elected by people who won’t live with the consequences of those decisions in the same way younger voters will.
Interestingly, it’s not a uniform story. Turnout among enrolled Māori voters aged 18 to 24 has actually been climbing steadily, according to Electoral Commission figures, up from 54.9% in 2014 to 70.3% in 2023. That suggests the problem isn’t that young people are inherently disengaged. It’s that something about how they’re being reached, or not reached, is working better in some communities than others.
What’s driving the drop-off
A few things seem to be compounding each other:
- Civics education is optional, not systematic. New Zealand has never had a compulsory civics curriculum. AUT political scientist Julienne Molineaux has argued this leaves a generation of voters without a basic grounding in how Parliament and elections actually work, and that the gap shows up directly in enrolment behaviour.
- Transience works against the current system. Enrolment is address-based, and young people move flats more often than older voters. Anyone who’s shifted since the last election needs to actively update their details, and if they don’t, it often creates the kind of special vote confusion the system struggles to process cleanly.
- A trust deficit. The sense that politics doesn’t speak to the issues young people actually face, or that a single vote won’t change the outcome, shows up repeatedly in the reporting on this.
- Nobody’s meeting them at 16 or 17, when they’re still easy to reach. By the time someone turns 18, they may have already left school, moved cities, or started work, all of which make the first enrolment step less automatic.
What might actually help
A few ideas, some already being pushed by campaigners and academics, seem worth taking seriously.
Lower the voting age to 16, paired with compulsory civics education. This isn’t a new idea, the Make It 16 campaign has been pushing it since 2019 and took it as far as the Court of Appeal. Molineaux’s argument is a practical one rather than a values-based one: 16 year olds are still in a classroom, which is the easiest possible place to walk someone through enrolling and voting for the first time. Do it later and you’ve lost that captive audience.
Bring pre-registration forward. The McGuinness Institute has floated dropping the pre-registration age from 17 to 15, so young people are automatically rolled onto the electoral roll the moment they turn 18 rather than having to take a first, unprompted action as a new adult juggling everything else that comes with it.
Put enrolment inside the school gate. Make It 16’s Sam Fountain has suggested mock elections and dedicated electorate enrolment days for students approaching 18, alongside wider use of Youth Parliament, which already gives 16 to 24 year old’s a genuine look behind the scenes at how Parliament works. Not every school currently teaches civics, so this would need to be consistent rather than optional.
Meet young people in the places they already are. The 2017 turnout bump, when 18 to 24 year old participation jumped noticeably, followed a concerted push from youth-focused campaigns working through channels young people actually used. That’s a reminder that engagement campaigns do work, they just need to be sustained rather than a one-off effort every three years.
Give young people a reason to believe their vote changes something. This is the harder one, because it’s less about electoral mechanics and more about whether political parties are genuinely engaging with the issues driving that sense of “why bother,” particularly housing and the cost of getting established as an adult. No amount of enrolment-day logistics fixes that on its own.
None of these are silver bullets individually. But enrolment reform, civics education, and parties actually giving young people something worth voting for probably need to move together, not as alternatives to each other. It was a good conversation to have with the Vote2026 team, and it’s one worth having loudly before October.
