Awatea Mita says it is dehumanising to be banned from voting. Photo: UGP / Kahu Kutia
A former inmate has accused the government of punching down on already marginalised communities - as it presses ahead with a total ban on prisoners voting.
The government has announced it will reverse a law change made by Labour in 2020 which allowed prisoners serving less than three years to vote in general elections.
Awatea Mita was incarcerated without the right to vote and now acts as a criminal justice advocate.
Mita told Midday Report she was very upset when she heard the news.
"I've been in that position...where I was denied the right to vote in 2014 election and I remember the humiliation and how I felt dehumanised.
"I think about the people who are in prison now, wanting to turn their lives around, like me, and have a say in a future that could support their efforts to become contributing members to their whānau, communities and society that we would all like them to be."
The voices of people in prison were essential and it was important to listen and understand their experiences so the collective solutions to harm in society are evidence based, she said.
"Voting is a way of saying their voice matters. Rather than stripping their rights away we could use humanising approaches that recognises people's dignity which is conducive to rehabilitation and reintegration."
Being in prison was the punishment, Mita said.
She said the right to vote was a fundamental pillar of a democracy.
"A blanket ban on voting prisoner rights is out of step with the rest of the world.
"It's important to remember that after the introduction of the complete voting ban in 2010, the number of non Māori removed from the electoral roll doubled. Now if that wasn't bad enough, the number of Māori removed from the electoral roll was increased ten-fold."
Re-enrolment rates for prisoners was also very low, she said.
Another former inmate Cosmo Jeffrey told RNZ he could not understand why anyone would oppose prisoners voting.
Jeffrey - now co-president of the Canterbury Howard League for Penal Reform - spent time behinds bars for drug importation from 2000 to 2002, a time when some prisoners were allowed to vote.
He said election day was a special time where inmates engaged in democracy and discussed their plans for the future.
"For the whole day, that was the centre of conversation. I've never experienced, in my times in prison, a time when there was more activity, more energy, and more focus on what people might do when they got out of jail, what this meant to them," Jeffrey said.
"The whole exercise could only be described as totally positive."
Jeffrey said stripping prisoners of that experience would only disconnect them further from society.
"People will get sour. People won't want to take part in the political process. People will not want to take a positive role in society if they're being punished [further] after they've been sentenced."
Jeffrey said the government was simply pandering to the "right-wing notion that you need to be 'tough on crime'".
"No one who breaks the law would ever think, 'Oh, I better not do this, because I may not be able to vote when I'm in jail'. It doesn't make any sense."
The government's reinstatement of the ban dismisses a ruling from the High Court and recommendations from the Electoral Commission and Waitangi Tribunal.
In 2015, the High Court ruled a blanket ban on prisoner voting was an unjustifiable limitation on the rights protected by the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act.
Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith said it was "perfectly legitimate for people to have an argument about the balance between rights and responsibilities".
The Independent Electoral Review, established in 2022, released its final report in 2024.
It agreed with the High Court, saying prisoners should have the right to vote.
And the Waitangi Tribunal in 2019 urged the government, then a Labour-NZ First coalition, to urgently remove the ban. It was removed in mid-2020.
"I totally disagree with that and the Electoral Commission … they can come up with suggestions, but we don't necessarily have to agree with them," Goldsmith said.
Mita said is was "abhorrent and yet unsurprising that the current government chooses to pursue an unjustifiable position on prisoner voting that punches down on Māori voters in particular at a time of significantly increases Māori voter participation and enrolments."
