If you're reading this, you should be voting

Happy election day!

Apologies for my absence in this most political of periods - my posts on this newsletter tend to take a few days and run a bit long, which means when the news is happening very fast they go stale before I’ve cleared my throat. If you for some reason are desperate for my reckons I post far too much for my own good over at Twitter.

I was going to write a bit of an electorate preview here but as you may know there’s a very silly law currently in place that makes that possibly illegal. You can’t publish anything on the day of the election that could influence voters, which is why you can’t see any election stories on news websites right now. It’s a rule very much of another time, when all the voting happened on the day and there was a perceived risk that a political candidate could make some outrageous accusation against an opponent the day of the election and get it published long before a defence could be mounted. Nowadays we largely vote early and I’m sure hundreds of people are currently lying about politics on social media, but that’s that.

What I can do is two things:

One - Tell you that if you enjoy my analysis I will be contributing some posts to The Guardian’s live blog of the New Zealand election through the election night.

Two - Encourage you to go out and vote if you haven’t already, and to encourage those in your life to do the same. We have an incredibly user-friendly electoral system in New Zealand and you should take advantage of it. As a reminder:

• You don’t need your EasyVote card.

• You don’t need an ID.

• You don’t need a proof of address.

• You don’t need to be enrolled before turning up.

There are hundreds of places to vote. If you live in a city you can probably walk outside and in any one direction for fifteen minutes and stumble upon a voting place. We have a voting system that means your vote matters no matter where you live. All the other methods of attempting to sway public policy - writing things, submitting to select committees, donating to politicians - are a real headache, and are mostly the tools of people with lots of time and money. Voting is easy. Go do it.