Mobilising Voters from the ‘Team of Five Million’: Electoral administration and turnout in the 2020 election

Two features of the 2020 election in New Zealand stand out above all others: the landslide victory of the Labour Party and a significant increase in electoral turnout, particularly among the young. This chapter analyses the latter. From the international literature and theories of turnout, one would not have expected a turnout increase as the result of an election held in 2020, given the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. Most research began from the inference that the fear of catching Covid-19 would discourage people from going out to vote (Picchio and Santolini 2021; Santana et al. 2020). Where risk is