Safety is the priority in the event the election goes ahead on September 19, Health Minister Chris Hipkins said today, saying it could run under Alert Level 2 "over a period of several weeks".
"The Electoral Commission have planned an election based around a Level 2 scenario," Mr Hipkins told TVNZ1's Q+A.
"They could conduct an election safely with the entire country at Level 2, with all of the distancing required.
"They'd run that over a period of several weeks so everybody had the opportunity to vote and so we didn't have huge long queues.
"They've got that all in hand. It's got to be safe."
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern will be announcing details around the election date tomorrow at 10am.
It comes as the country sits in Alert Level 2, and Auckland in Alert Level 3 after a community-based outbreak of Covid-19.
"One of the things that is puzzling about this is we still don't know how this one emerged," Mr Hipkins said.
"It doesn't appear to have any link to the border or any of the areas we would expect there to be heightened risk. It is still a puzzle. It came out of nowhere and we got on top of it very quickly."
He said 1500 close contacts have been identified.
When asked if every time there was community outbreak the area would plunge into lockdown - Mr Hipkins said "the strategy we've got in New Zealand is still the right one for us here".
"If we do this well, then we could go in and out of lockdown very quickly and that's the goal here. Everyone's livelihoods rest on us getting this right and getting out of lockdown as quickly as we can."
On making masks mandatory in public areas, Mr Hipkins said they had never ruled out compulsion around masks, however they were dealing with supply issues currently.
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