The Electoral Commission is looking towards planning for the 2017 election and wants lawmakers to look at the option of online voting, Radio New Zealand reports.
Turnout at this year's election was up about 3.5 per cent compared to 2011, but still an estimated one million people chose not to vote.
Electoral Commission chief executive Robert Peden says the commission wants to look at ways to encourage a higher voter turnout and allowing people to vote online could help.
“The sensible way to do that would be to gradually introduce the option. So you would start with making it an option, for example, for overseas voters,” he said.
Associate professor of the university's politics programme, Richard Shaw, says online democracy would not be a silver bullet for addressing low voter turnout.
“If you made the act of voting easier by reducing the amount of time that it takes somebody to get out and go to and express their preference at a physical ballot booth, then you would actually solve the problem of falling turnout.
“But falling turnout has got an awful lot more to do with the existence of socio-economic inequality. So we know that an awful lot of people who do not vote are young, but they are also poor.”
