1:32pm Sunday Conversation article up about this big win for Labour.
10:27pm Labour currently leads National by 49-27 when pollsters said they led by about 15 points. A plausible explanation was the large undecided or refused component in polls of over 10%.
The final Colmar Brunton poll had Ardern’s lead over Collins as better PM blowing out from 50-23 to 55-20. I don’t like the better PM measure, but perhaps it was an indicator of how the undecided would break.
10:23pm As I said before, these results are not final. Final results will be released November 6. In the past, there has been a shift to the left from election night to final results. If that happens again, the pollsters will look even worse.
10:20pm In comments, people have said that the Greens won their first electorate seat in 1999. Apologies for my mistake.
8:55pm In Auckland Central, the Greens lead Labour by 490 with 98% reporting. So they should get their first ever electorate seat. In Waiariki, Maori leads Labour by 294 with 92% reporting.
8:30pm Labour has steadied at 49.0% with 82% counted. There’s also still 12% of advance votes to go, where Labour is at 50.8%. Labour’s current projection is 64 of the 120 seats.
I’m CALLING a Labour majority government, the first majority NZ government since they adopted proportional representation in 1996.
7:50pm Labour down to 49.3% with 63% reporting. Likely that they’ll keep dropping as more election day votes are counted, maybe ending with around 47-48%.
7:46pm In Waiariki, the Maori candidate is now leading by 28 votes with 64% reporting. If that holds, Maori wins one parliamentary seat.
7:39pm Labour’s overall vote down to 49.5% with 57% reporting. They got 50.7% on the advance vote with 80% of that reporting.
7:35pm Labour’s lead back to 34 votes in Waiariki with 56% reporting.
7:33pm Labour’s lead over the Maori party is just one vote in Waiariki. If Maori win this seat, they’ll be in parliament, though their party vote of under 1% means they’ll only get one seat.
7:22pm One theory for this difference is that people who took coronavirus more seriously tended to be on the left, and they thought voting early was a good precaution.
7:20pm There’s clearly a difference between election day and advance voting. Labour is down to 49.9% overall, despite having 50.7% on advance votes. That’s with 47% counted.
6:55pm We’re now getting some election day votes, and it looks as if they’re a bit better for National. Labour’s overall vote is 50.4% now with 36% reporting, compared with 50.7% on the advance vote.
6:06pm The Greens are leading Labour by 396 votes in Auckland Central. They have 8% of the party vote, but winning a single-member seat would give them more security in future elections.
6:03pm In the Maori seat of Waiariki, Labour leads the Maori candidate by just 28 votes. If Maori win, they will be in parliament.
5:50 With 34% of advance votes counted, Labour is still just over 50%. Unless National does much better on election day votes, this is looking like a clear Labour parliamentary majority.
5:40 With 25% of advance votes counted, Labour leads National by 50-26, with 8% for the Greens and ACT. The Maori party is also shown as winning one electorate seat, thus entering parliament.
5:32 18% of advance votes counted, and Labour is on 49.9%.
5:28 Over 10% of advance votes have been counted, and Labour has 51%, National 26%, the Greens 8.4%, ACT 7.5% and NZ First 2.2%. Labour is currently winning 65 of the 120 seats. We’ll see if this holds up.
5:15pm AEDT With 2% of booths counted, presumably early votes, Labour has 50%, National 27%, the Greens and ACT 8% each.
Guest post by Adrian Beaumont, who joins us from time to time to provide commentary on elections internationally. Adrian is an honorary associate at the University of Melbourne. His work on electoral matters for The Conversation can be found here, and his own website is here.
The New Zealand election is today. Polls close at 7pm local time (5pm AEDT). The final Colmar Brunton poll gave Labour 46%, National 31%, the Greens 8%, the right-wing ACT 8% and NZ First 3%. A Reid Research poll, conducted October 8-15, gave Labour 46%, National 31%, ACT 7%, the Greens 6% and NZ First 3.5%. A Labour/Greens government is the most likely outcome, with NZ First short of the 5% threshold to re-enter parliament. Labour could also win a majority in its own right.
The nominally 120-seat parliament has 72 single-member seats, elected by first-past-the-post, and 48 list seats. List seats are used as a top-up; parties that do well in single-member seats receive few list seats. Electors receive two votes: one for their local member and one for their preferred party.
It is the party vote that determines how many seats each party is proportionally entitled to, provided they either pass the 5% threshold or win a single-member seat. Contests between the major parties for single-member seats are irrelevant for determining overall seat entitlements. However, a single-member win by a non-major party candidate would put that party in partliament even if its party vote was below 5%.
Other than Epsom, already held by ACT’s leader, the best chance for a minor party breakthrough appears to be the seven seats reserved for those on the Māori roll. The Māori party won some of these seats between 2005 and 2014. In the first three of these elections, Māori wins caused an “overhang” because they won more single-member seats than entitled under the party vote. Parliament was expanded to accommodate these extra seats.
Over 1.7 million people have already voted, and I believe we will get the early vote results early on election night. The election night count is not final. Final results will not be released until November 6. In the past, there has been a shift of one or two seats towards left-wing parties from the election night to the final results.
There will be two referendums held with this election, one on legalising cannabis and the other on allowing euthanasia for terminally ill patients. The electoral commission will not count the referendum results on election night, and initial results will not be released until October 30.
@Steve777 Trump and his followers hate postal voting, so things work differently in the USA as well.
Aside from the fact that Trump’s opposition is hardly representative of anything, the reality is that it’s the Republicans that have generally been the biggest supporters of postal voting, and for the most part continue to be big supporters. Trump’s opposition is just the usual Trump vomit from nowhere. See, for example
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/06/trump-republicans-vote-mail-arizona-florida/612625/
It’s not even clear that Trump’s opposition to mail in ballots is a net positive for Republicans. A lot of the biggest users of mail in ballots are traditional Republican voting blocks, particularly the elderly and people in the military, so Trump talking down postal voting could very easily end up shooting himself in the foot.
Notwithstanding the above, in the US the shift after election day is typically left as Democrat voters are more likely to cast provisional ballots, mostly because they are more likely to be challenged as a result of voter-id requirements and to experience issues with the electoral roll such as typos in their address or being incorrectly removed.