How noise drowns democracy
- Grant McLachlan
- 2 hours ago
- 9 min read
How political noise is engineered to silence debate and freeze the vote.
I have volunteered for, worked on, directed, or analysed election campaigns for more than thirty-five years. In that time I have learned to read one signal above almost all others. When a campaign starts attracting noise — organised heckling, vandalised hoardings, a sudden swarm online — it usually means the campaign is working.
Noise is not the sign of a fair fight. It is the sign that someone has decided a message is dangerous and needs to be drowned out.
Noise is a tactic, not an accident. Its purpose is simple: shut down debate so that the issues are never properly aired, and the electorate is left with only what suits the people making the most of it.
A voter who has weighed both sides is unpredictable. A voter who never got to hear the other side is not.
Contents
The undecided voter is the target
Candidate meetings are where this is most naked.
I have watched the same rent-a-mob move from venue to venue, shouting down opposing candidates and applauding their own on cue. I have seen community halls packed so tightly with supporters brought in for the night that undecided locals could not find a seat, let alone ask a question.
Picture being that undecided voter.
You came to weigh up the candidates. Instead, you spend the evening unable to hear a word over the jeering, and you leave shaking your head — not at any candidate, but at the conduct of the crowd.
I have stood at the back of those rooms as a campaign director and watched people walk out early, decided in the worst way. They did not change their vote. They withdrew it.
Every party has done it
No party comes to this with clean hands.
I remember candidates mounting stake-outs to catch opponents slashing tyres and lifting leaflets — on one campaign I went out to watch our own hoardings overnight and found a rival candidate already parked up in the dark, doing exactly the same thing.
The tactics are bipartisan because the logic is universal.
That logic is at its sharpest in a marginal seat whose boundaries have just shifted. If a sitting member holds a tight electorate and a redraw has added unfamiliar territory, whoever stands to gain wants those new voters to behave as they did previously. The last thing they want is a real contest in which the incumbent makes a fresh case to them.
Drowning out the incumbent is cheaper than beating them on the merits.
I saw exactly that in 1999, helping Richard Prebble defend Wellington Central — the seat he had taken in 1996. National did not even stand a candidate. But an old hand warned me at the outset that the boundaries had changed and the new voters would sink him regardless. He was right.
When the count came in, it was the last two booths — both new to the electorate — that swung it.
Prebble lost by 1,482. The campaign in between was as loud as any I have seen.
The noise has gone digital
Online, the mechanics are identical and the cost has collapsed.
Likes can be bought for a pittance. Trolling can be contracted offshore. If a comment thread is buried under replies that have nothing to do with the argument, readers switch off and move on — which is the point.
The signal drowns in the static.
I can offer a live example.
A fortnight ago, I published this article about the New Zealand First strategy in Hawke's Bay. Yesterday, a condensed version was published by Hawke's Bay Today.
Within minutes of publishing the first article, the Parliamentary staffer for New Zealand First and Napier City Councillor Te Kira Lawrence (who said that she was a Labour and Act voter when she ran for council) was the first to comment:
She didn't read my article. In fact, no one had read my article before she commented. Then hundreds did.
She then deleted her comments.
Within minutes of the article appearing on that Facebook group, it was buried under several new posts.
Yesterday, my Hawke's Bay Today column couldn't be buried.
I argued that the Napier and Tukituki electorates could decide who governs New Zealand in November. The piece set out the MMP arithmetic behind New Zealand First's candidate strategy — why Stuart Nash in Napier and Taine Randell in Tukituki are positioned to split the vote rather than win it, and what that means for Winston Peters as kingmaker.
At the time of publishing this column, it attracted 267 comments on the Hawke's Bay Today Facebook page.
Only one of them engaged with the argument.
One.
A commenter named Craig Nisbet observed that if National stood candidates in both seats, the vote would split and Labour might come through the middle — which was precisely the scenario the column had mapped. He was not disagreeing. He was confirming.
The other 266 comments?
Predicably, most of the first comments were from New Zealand First supporters.
Then the tide turned.
“Nash is a crook.” “Randell is an overrated All Black.” “Winston is a clown.” NZ First is either the future of New Zealand politics or a circus — the thread contained both views within three posts of each other, which tells you something about the quality of the political discourse on offer.
One commenter announced he would rather vote for, and I am quoting faithfully here, “the rotting corpse of a dead ferret that had repeatedly been run over by trucks” than for Stuart Nash. Another said Nash had “changed, learned, grown” — and invited proof to the contrary. A third posted a meme of Winston Peters as Master of the Middle. A fourth raised the World Economic Forum.
See for yourself:
Nobody mentioned an overhang.
Nobody asked about other electorate races' effect on the list.
Nobody, in 267 attempts, asked the question the column was actually written to answer: how many MPs does Hawke's Bay need, and who decides?
Talkback works the same way. Whataboutism is noise in its purest form. It answers an argument by changing the subject, usually to smear a particular person.
Parties have long coordinated callers armed with the same rehearsed lines, so that what sounds like spontaneous public opinion is really a playlist.
Political news itself is often pitched to journalists by people whose job is to manufacture the weather.
At the largest scale, noise stops looking like noise at all. It looks like a movement.
When the same handful of operatives can stand up a taxpayers' group, a farmers' group and a free-speech group that all happen to attack the same target in the same week, the effect is an echo chamber that drowns out a popular government while wearing the costume of grassroots concern.
I traced that machinery in Unleashed and in my account of the clandestine campaign to dismantle Jacindamania.
Defacing as a science
Billboard vandalism has become its own craft, and it cuts both ways.
At the gentle end, it can humanise, like when Jimmy Fallon roughed up Donald Trump's hair.
Last election an artist repainted a David Seymour hoarding on Cambridge Road outside Tauranga as Ken from the Barbie film — pink jeep, palm trees, the lot. Seymour loved it, called it the best billboard vandalism he had ever seen, and used the image as a backdrop on election night.
A decade earlier John Key had been turned into Batman.
Played well, ridicule can make a politician look like a good sport.
At the savage end it does the opposite.
That same Wellington Central campaign was a running siege.
One crew worked through our hoardings cutting the faces off the coreflutes; another pasted Montgomery Burns — the grasping plutocrat from The Simpsons — over Prebble's face, speech bubbles and all.
When an enormous billboard for Prebble's new book went up on the old Wellington Fire Station above Courtenay Place, someone abseiled down in the dark and replaced his face with Burns again, captioned "I'd privatise my mother."
For the final month I drove the electorate removing every coreflute at dusk and re-erecting it before dawn.
None of it was satire meant to make him likeable. It was built to fix one image in voters' minds before he could offer them another.
Politicians understand the power of the genre well enough that some have been caught quietly defacing their own hoardings, hoping a little manufactured victimhood buys them sympathy in the morning paper.
The cost is the debate itself
Noise does more than bury a message.
At its most effective it demonises and ridicules the messenger, and once a bandwagon starts rolling it can turn a contest before the issues are ever weighed.
The casualty is never really the candidate who attracts the noise. It is the voter who came with an open mind and left without the information to make it up.
Go back to those 267 comments. The column they ostensibly responded to contained a specific, verifiable claim: that Hawke's Bay voters face a structural choice between sending MPs who answer to Peters and sending none at all. Not a single commenter tested that claim. Not one asked whether it was true, or what evidence supported it, or what the counter-argument might be.
They had the argument replaced, in real time, by the noise. And they did it to themselves.
That is the most efficient form of the tactic.
You do not need operatives or offshore trolls when the audience will self-organise around personalities and grievances and leave the structural question untouched on the table.
Palota Reipa
Politicians would stop treating voters like sheep if voters stopped acting like sheep.
There is a relationship here, and it does not flatter either party.
The bleating that passes for political comment online — the tribal noise, the personality attacks, the memes, the 266 comments that proved nothing — is not just harmless venting. It has a consequence.
When voters disengage from the argument and perform their allegiances instead, they hand the management of the election to people who are paying closer attention.
I have seen what close attention looks like from the other side of a polling booth.
Scrutineers are a strange anomaly of New Zealand’s electoral system. They are entitled to stand inside a voting venue wearing a party rosette, observe the conduct of electoral officials and other parties — and say absolutely nothing to voters. That is the rule. They watch. They do not speak.
On one election day, I was doing the rounds of voting venues in the electorate to check on my candidate’s scrutineers. One scrutineer, who was a very well-known community figure, was approached by many voters for a chat, which drew the ire of an Electoral Commission official.
On the other side of town, I noticed a convoy of white minibuses pulled up at the kerb near another voting venue. Large Polynesians wearing red rosettes escorted voters into the vans, sometimes by slapping them on the back of their heads.
I followed the convoy to a kindergarten being used as a polling place. Inside, a large Polynesian woman in a red rosette had positioned herself just inside the entrance like a roundabout, greeting each person who came through the door with the same two words: “Palota Reipa.”
I found a mousy Electoral Commission official nearby and asked what was being done about the Labour scrutineer. She told me the scrutineer was being very helpful. I had to explain to her that Palota Reipa means “Vote Labour.”
That polling booth was the last counted that night. My candidate went from leading to losing by a significant margin.
Both Labour and National realise that their voters give so little thought to politics that they factor the All Blacks schedule and the weather into their election date calculations.
This is not a conspiracy theory — it is openly discussed campaign tradecraft.
When Jacinda Ardern set the 2023 election date, political commentators immediately checked it against the Rugby World Cup final.
When Christopher Luxon was weighing his 2026 date, The Spinoff’s analysis ran through the All Blacks schedule as a live factor alongside public holidays and international summits.
Nobody found this remarkable.
It should be remarkable.
It means that party strategists believe — with good reason — that a meaningful number of voters will make different decisions depending on whether the All Blacks played well the night before and whether it is raining.
If that is your model of the electorate, you will not waste time arguing policy. You will manage the weather.
The current government has drawn its own conclusions about unengaged voters — and they are not flattering.
The Electoral Amendment Act 2025 closed enrolment thirteen days before election day and reinstated a blanket ban on prisoner voting, including for sentences under three years.
In 2023, 110,000 people enrolled or updated their details on election day alone.
The government’s answer was not to make enrolment easier. It was to move the fence.
The Attorney-General’s own report found the prisoner voting ban inconsistent with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. The government passed it anyway.
The RNZ account of the bill’s passage records ACT’s David Seymour describing same-day enrollers as “dropkicks that can’t get themselves organised.”
That is what the governing coalition thinks of the unengaged voter — not a citizen to be reached, but a demographic to be managed, moved into a different paddock, or simply removed from the count.
Voters are not sheep by nature. They become sheep when the noise is loud enough and the argument quiet enough that there is nothing left to do but flock into the van.
