Five Million Voices is a non-partisan civic tool. We built it because the thing that holds a democracy together — ordinary people able to see what their representatives actually do, and hold them to it — is getting harder to find, all over the world. New Zealand is one of the strongest democracies on earth. That's exactly why it's worth defending before it erodes.
This isn't a mood. The two most respected democracy monitors have been measuring the same slide for years.
Democracies rarely die in a coup any more. They are hollowed out slowly, legally, while elections still happen — until the rules, the courts, and the facts no longer hold.
Because strong democracies don't usually fall over — they erode, quietly, one unwatched vote at a time. New Zealand scores near the top of every index. But the same pressures are here: long stretches between elections when hundreds of bills pass with no input from us; laws rushed through under urgency with the public submission stage skipped entirely; a record that gets recast as a scorecard and buried under the next set of promises.
Complacency is how good democracies go bad. The cure is boring, and it's ours: pay attention to the record.
That's all this tool is — a place to read what Parliament actually voted on, in plain English, decide for yourself, and see how that lines up with how your representatives actually voted. Here's the fuller case for why we built it →
We don't tell you who's right. We show the record — every party's actual votes — and let you decide.
Every figure traces to the official parliamentary record or a named source. If we can't show our working, we don't publish it.
No paywall, no ads, built on public data. You can vote without even making an account.
We never ask your name, never sell data, and only ever show aggregate results. How we handle data →
Feedback, corrections, ideas — feedback@fivemillionvoices.nz. Media and press — media@fivemillionvoices.nz (media enquiries are answered first — see the media FAQ).
Sources — V-Dem Institute, Democracy Report 2025 (figures cover 2024) · Freedom House, Freedom in the World 2025 · European Parliament (Sept 2022) · UK Statistics Authority (2016) · Reuters Institute, Digital News Report 2024. The European Parliament's declaration is a political resolution, not a binding ruling. Democracy-index figures are from the 2025 reports (covering 2024); both bodies continue to classify the United States as a democracy.