the Human Rights Commission who pointed out that, in addition to being inconsistent with the Bill of Rights, the legislation was also incompatible with various international treaties that New Zealand is party to. Law Society Human Rights committee member, Jonathan Temm, in a written submission, told Parliament's law and order committee that: "It is critical for the function of our democracy that we do not interfere with the right to vote." With specific reference to decisions made by courts in Canada, Australia and South Africa, and by the European Court of Human Rights in respect of the United Kingdom, she pointed out that "every comparable overseas jurisdiction has had a blanket ban (against prisoners' voting) struck down in the last 10 years". In 2020, the Electoral Act was amended so that only persons serving a sentence of imprisonment for a term of three years or more are disenfranchised – this restores the law to the position prior to 2010. Election day Until the , elections were held on a weekday. In 1938 and in , elections were held on a Saturday. In and , elections were held on a Wednesday. In 1950, the legal requirement to hold elections on a Saturday was introduced, and this first applied to the . Beginning with the , a convention was formed to hold general elections on the last Saturday of November. This convention was upset by Robert Muldoon calling a snap election, which was held on Saturday 14 July . The next year an election could have been held on the last Saturday of November would have been 1996, except the day for that election was brought forward slightly to avoid the need for a by-election after Hawkes' Bay MP Michael Laws resigned in April that year (by-elections are not required if a general election is to take place within six months of the vacancy). Since then, only the and have been held on the traditional day. In the twenty-first century, a new convention seems to have arisen: since the , all elections except two have been held on the second-last Saturday of September. The exceptions were in 2011, which was held in November to avoid clashing with fixtures of the New Zealand-hosted Rugby World Cup, and in 2020, which was delayed from the second-last Saturday of September due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior to 1951, elections in Māori electorates were held on