Your online information, using our websites, and calling our contact centre

If you have a New Zealand driver licence, New Zealand passport or RealMe verified identity, you can fully enrol or update your details online.

How to enrol or update online
Learn more about the personal information you give us when you enrol or update

If you have a RealMe login, you can use it to fill out an enrolment form online. You’ll then need to sign a printed copy and send it back to us.

The Department of Internal Affairs runs RealMe®

The Department of Internal Affairs runs the RealMe® service, which lets you:

• access multiple online services with one username and password
• securely prove who you are online.

Read the RealMe® terms of use

You can look up your enrolment details on our website to check if they’re correct and update them if they’re not. If you try to use this online service for any other reason, we may suspend or disable your access.

We can’t guarantee the privacy or confidentiality of any information you email to us because the internet is not fully secure. However, we’ll keep information you send us private and we won’t share your email address. We use the information you provide us to answer your enquiries, or respond to requests. 

We collect information about how people interact with the emails we send, such as whether an email we’ve sent has been opened. We use this information to tailor our approach to communication campaigns, and for insights and reporting purposes. For example, information about whether people have received a digital EasyVote card, will determine other ways we can get this to them. 

We collect information made available by email clients and servers, about the devices and apps or software used to open or view emails. This information is collected to inform us about design choices and help ensure viewability of emails we send across various devices.     

The information you provide us when you call our telephone numbers is used to identify you, answer your enquiries or respond to requests. Calls to our contact centre are recorded and may be used for training or quality assurance purposes. 

Occasionally we ask the public to make submissions on electoral issues, such as boundary reviews.

If you complete a submission form on our website, we may pass the information you give us on to:

• other people in the Electoral Commission
• government agencies and third parties involved in the project or consultation.

The information you enter in a submission form could include information which identifies you.

You can register to get notifications about our job openings. When you register, and provide personal information, we’ll only use this information for recruitment and statistical purposes.

You can browse our websites without sharing any personal information. Only use a standard web browser to access our sites.

We collect information about visitors to our websites

We use Google Analytics — a web analytics service — to track and report on our website traffic. We don’t use Google Analytics to track, collect or match any personally identifiable information about you.

We use the information from Google Analytics to help us improve our sites. The information is transmitted to Google and they store it outside New Zealand. Google Analytics collects:

• the first three parts of your device’s IP address
• the pages you access and links you click on
• the date and time you visit the site• the site you click through from
• your device’s operating system (such as Windows 7 or Mac OSX)
• the web browser you use (such as Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox)
• other information, such as your screen resolution and language setting.

We use cookies

We use 'cookies' to collect information about how people use our site. Cookies don’t store any personal information about you.

You can turn off cookies and tracking

You can turn off cookies and still use our site. Check the help instructions in your web browser to find out how to turn off cookies. Turning off cookies will also turn off Google Analytics tracking.

You can only access our websites with a standard web browser

You can only access our websites using standard web browsers. You can’t access our website in any other way without our consent.

Methods you must not use include, but aren’t limited to:

• scraping or harvesting
• copying pages or functionality
• mining data
• using robots or spiders
• using automation or other data gathering or extraction methods.