No more free food, no more last-minute voting, after controversial law change
- Hge News
- Dec 17, 2025
- 2 min read
No more free food, no more last-minute voting, after controversial law change
The Government has locked in controversial election law changes, which will ban last-minute voter enrolment and free food near polling stations.
Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith shepherded through his electoral law changes on Tuesday night, which passed Parliament’s final hurdle. The Government used urgency to speed up the process last week, and required MPs stay late into the night to consider the law changes.
The Electoral Amendment Bill included a range of new changes for how elections would run. It would:
Allow for more anonymous donations to political parties by increasing, from $5000 to $6000, the threshold at which the donor’s name must be declared.
Reinstate a ban on prisoner voting. The previous government allowed prisoners serving a sentence of less than three years to vote.
Make it illegal to give out free food, or provide entertainment, within 100m of a voting station.
Introduce automatic enrolment updates, so the Electoral Commission can update enrolment details using data from other government agencies.
Close enrolments 13 days before an election.
In previous elections, people have been able to enrol on election day itself.
The law change would also block people from being able to update their address within that two-week period, if they moved house or realised they were in the wrong electorate. The commission said that would hit a further 72,000 people.
Its advice to the Government also dismissed justifications from ministers that the change was needed to speed up the vote count. Last-minute enrolments had been counted as special votes, which take more time to process.
But the commission said this law change would not speed up the vote count, even though Goldsmith said he was changing the law to get faster results.
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