KEY POINTS:
What would Richard Seddon have thought of it all? For seven hours in the skies over Auckland on polling day 2008, a small plane criss-crossed the city trailing the message: "Tick, tick, it's time to vote."
That same day, if you were a woman at the movies and popped into the toilets with your mate to freshen up, you will have met the slogan, "If you bring your friends to the loo, why not vote with them too?"
Then, once you found your seat in the cinema, you may have been buzzed with the text message: "Don't forget to vote".
Is that what it's come to? We need an aerial gimmick, a bathroom banner and a text alert to persuade us to get out there and choose the mob that will run our lives for the next three years?
What a strange thing. Over the centuries, men and women have fought and died for the right to decide who will spend their taxes - yet, once the precious vote has been secured, it seems our interest wanes. So much for the treasure of democracy.
With the whiff of political change, record numbers on the roll and an electorate galvanised by a United States election, the reward of a decent turnout might have been democracy's due in 2008.
Instead, after a campaign without life or promise, we continued to vote with our backsides rather than our feet, producing the second-worst turnout of registered voters in more than a century.
The final voting figures reveal that just 79.5 per cent made it to the polls - a couple of points shy of the miserable 77 per cent of 2002. While the number of registered voters was a record, about 150,000 people didn't bother to enrol; of those who did, 600,000 stayed at home.
You'd need to go back to the days of Seddon in 1902 to find a worse result - when casting a vote was a logistics trial as well as a privilege.
When we voted overwhelmingly at the 1967 referendum to stay with three-yearly parliamentary elections, rather than the four-year alternative, it suggested New Zealanders were rather attached to casting a vote. But it was a sign of that era, not this.
As governments have eased out of our lives and society has found more to engage in than rugby, weather and politics, the pride we once felt in doing our democratic duty has been eroded.
Mature voters may still tend do what they always have, but the young - with no interest in newspapers and news bulletins and not exposed to political debate and issues - are often in a different world.
It is also a different New Zealand. The influence of the British stock that moulded our democracy is now well diluted and migrant Kiwis have given us a fresh and perhaps tentative face when polling day arrives.
All that has happened relatively quickly, coinciding with the arrival of MMP. It may seem unfair to point an accusing finger for our declining election turnout at the feet of MMP - the system that was to give us a more rounded democracy - but it probably deserves some of the blame.
If we're honest, most New Zealanders would struggle to write a clear precis of exactly how it works and as a nation we're still to really catch on. An Electoral Commission survey this year was pleased to discover that two-thirds of us now know the party vote is more important than the electorate vote. What does that say about the remaining third? The nuances of the system seem too much for too many.
Logically, with the party vote given meaning wherever it is cast, there should be a stronger poll under MMP. But except for the 1996 debut when the country was bombarded with publicity, the reverse has happened - suggesting MMP's more complicated processes have repelled a portion of the electorate. Either that or there's a sense the system brings compromise upon compromise and a result of new faces but small difference.
Look at these groupings (taking average results at brackets of four successive elections since 1951) and the trend seems clear: 1951-1960, 91 per cent; 1963-1972, 88.5 per cent; 1975-1984, 87 per cent; 1987-1996, 87 per cent; 1999-2008, 80.55 per cent.
At times like this we tend to glance around the globe for answers, but the reality is that a fair bit of the world is looking at us. While we worry about our levels, other democracies are doing worse and it's obvious that the times we live in are playing a role here as much as any impact from MMP.
From highs of around 82 per cent in the 1950s and 75 per cent in 1987, Britain slipped below 60 per cent in 2001 - and crept just above it four years later. Canada stayed around 80 per cent in the 50s and 60s, but slid to 60 per cent this year.
The United States fancies itself as democracy's shining beacon, but one-in-two Americans apparently couldn't give a star or stripe about presidential elections. Kennedy and the turmoil of the 1960s got the turnout above 60 per cent, but since then it's hovered between 49 and 55 per cent.
Even in Australia, where voting is compulsory, 5 per cent of the electorate stays away, though the wellbeing of the country is hardly harmed by their exclusion.
Does it matter if we are not voting in the numbers we used to? Perhaps not, if it means that those who don't bother have no interest, but it does, surely, if it suggests our system is effectively turning away people who want to vote - and that may be happening to some degree.
Our problem is that we don't know for sure who isn't voting - and why - because those people are as unlikely to engage in a research programme as they are to visit a polling place. But there are some leads worth exploring.
The vote in lower socio-economic electorates appears to be sliding in step with the overall decline, and that's no surprise. The Labour theory was that wealthier people got to the polls because they had more to lose, and it's accepted that a high turnout aids parties of the Left, and a low turnout favours the Right.
As well, there may be a degree of bewilderment about our political process for new migrants but a major worry is non-voting youth, especially those from lower socio-eonomic backgrounds.
Electoral Commission research last year involved 34 non-voting New Zealanders (17 Maori, nine Pakeha and eight of Pacific Islands heritage) from low-to-middle income households who were entitled to vote at either or both the 2002 and 2005 elections. The two general reactions from all 34 subjects: "I'm in the dark" or "it's not on my wavelength".
The commission is trying to throw light on that wavelength, and this election invested more of its $1 million campaign budget to reach young people - getting into Bebo and Facebook as well as schools and universities, and offering text reminders.
Expect more school programmes and gimmicks in the future. But making young people proud to cast their first vote and turning it into a habit will be tough when anecdotal evidence suggests many doubt they can have - or deserve to have - an influence and are worried they will be made to look silly.
The fear of confronting something new and uncertainty of how to go about it was behind the commission's loo campaign and some of its other initiatives. It believes a safety-in-numbers approach or, even better, voting with Mum and Dad, can reduce the fear and help create the habit.
A curious thing is that no agency has the statutory responsibility of getting people out to vote, presumably because we're not meant to need encouragement. Fiery campaigns, explosive and divisive politicians and handouts should merely add the cream to electoral turnout.
The commission, responsible for filling the rolls, has taken a de facto role in getting us to the polling booth, and perhaps it's time to consider a new office with the objective of taking us back to where we once were.
But really, in times of middle-of-the-road governments, what would bring us flooding back, outside of enducements to go with the campaign handouts? Forget about compulsion - it's not in our culture to be turned around by force - and postal voting, which makes the process less inconvenient for those who do vote but does little to encourage the rest.
Zeroing in on the young - getting them to break the ice and start a habit - is as sound a strategy as any, and beefing up the senior school curriculum could be where that starts.
But in the end we may have to accept that a growing portion of us don't really care.
We might soon have to accept that a 70 per cent vote is as close as we get to a model democracy.
