More than 7000 under voting ban

When New Zealand’s first election was held in 1853 only British men over the age of 21, who had at least £50 worth of land to their name and were not serving a criminal sentence, were eligible to vote.

The Ma¯ori electorates were established 14 years later, while women waited four decades for suffrage.

Now, any New Zealand citizen or permanent resident aged 18 and over can exercise their democratic right to vote – with some exceptions.

Parliament in 2010 passed a law preventing prisoners from voting. According to Corrections’ instructions, anyone sentenced to imprisonment on or after December 16, 2010, is not entitled to vote.

The National MP who submitted the bill, Paul Quinn, argued at the time that anyone serving a sentence, even if they were in prison for one day, had broken the law and should lose the right to vote.

Quinn’s argument was that twothirds of inmates had more than 10 convictions before going to prison the first time and were given ‘‘plenty of warning’’.

‘‘In this day and age people only go to prison for serious crime,’’ Quinn said then. ’’We don’t just put them in there for a holiday’’.

People on remand awaiting trial or sentence are also eligible to enrol and vote.

People Against Prisons Aotearoa (Papa) picketed outside National MP Nikki Kaye’s central Auckland office yesterday, protesting to get voting rights back.

A spokeswoman for the prisoner advocacy group, Emilie Ra¯kete, said not allowing prisoners, who were mostly Ma¯ori, to vote was a ‘‘racist attempt to disenfranchise some of New Zealand’s most vulnerable’’.

‘‘Denying prisoners the right to vote is a blatant breach of their human rights,’’ Ra¯kete said.

More than 7000 New Zealanders would not have the right to vote this year because they were in prison, undermining the legitimacy of the electoral process, Ra¯kete said.

In 2015, Arthur Taylor, a selfdescribed ‘‘jailhouse lawyer’’, and four other prisoners won a High Court ruling asking for a declaration that the law banning prisoners serving terms less than three years from voting was inconsistent with the Bill of Rights. Despite this, the law still stands.

‘‘Voting is a basic human right. Denying prisoners that right sends the message that the government does not consider prisoners to be fully human,’’ Ra¯kete said.

Social justice advocate Kim Workman said not allowing prisoners the right to vote was a punitive measure and a ‘‘missed opportunity’’.

Given 51 per cent of New Zealand’s prisoners were Ma¯ori, and would vote in Ma¯ori electorates, their votes would affect the outcome, Workman said.

Instead, the idea that offenders ceded their right to vote once they had offended punished people beyond the sentence received.

‘‘The view of the government, up until recently, was that you go to prison as punishment not for punishment. You’ve done wrong, you’re being punished for that, but you’re still a human being.’’

By involving prisoners in civic education they could in turn become more aware of their own rights, becoming more responsible citizens, Workman said.

‘‘Taking away rights can have the opposite effect really – causing [offenders] to believe they are less than human, and therefore entitled to behave as less than human.’’