November 22, 2023 7:00am by David Farrar

Parker’s idea has some merit

The Labour MP said one way to reduce the time needed is to make sure the Electoral Roll is as up to date as it can be, cutting down on the need for people to enrol or update their details on or close to the day.

“I reckon that New Zealand should update the Electoral Roll based on the IRD database rather than having a separate Electoral Roll that sort of doesn’t talk to other databases,” he told Newshub.

“A lot of other countries in Scandinavia and Canada base their Electoral Roll on their IRD database or some other national database and it would save a hell of a lot of money, get a more accurate roll, entitle people to vote and have a quicker conclusion after the election.”

Parker, the former Revenue Minister who oversaw the Inland Revenue Department (IRD), said the main benefit of using the IRD database is that virtually every voter has an IRD number.

“All students do, obviously everyone in work, whether they’re self employed or waged or salaried, every beneficiary, everyone has an IRD number,” he said.

“The Inland Revenue Department system is very, very sophisticated, [and] was recently upgraded. That upgrade was completed in the last few years and the capacity to use the data that they now hold for export into other databases like the Electoral Roll I’m sure could be achieved.”

This has some merit.

The Electoral Roll database does actually get information matched to other databases. They actually match against: