NZ Electoral Commission Reports Errors at 15 Voting Places

Election day at Johnsonville School in Wellington, New Zealand on Oct. 14, 2023. (Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images)

The New Zealand Electoral Commission has found data errors at multiple voting places following the election.

The commission said despite the errors, there are no changes to the “overall results, successful candidates or allocation of seats.”

The election was held on Oct. 14, with the centre-right National Party receiving the majority of votes. Thousands of “special votes” were then counted following the election, and a government is yet to form in New Zealand officially.

The National, ACT, and New Zealand First parties remain negotiating to form a new government.

The New Zealand electoral commission has found 15 voting places with data entry errors, resulting in “small changes for electorate candidate results.”

In one electorate, data for a small number of special votes was entered “incorrectly.”

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In addition, five voting places entered election day votes as advance voting. The commission said this did not impact the total votes for parties or candidates.

In the East Coast electorate, 620 votes that were incorporated into the preliminary vote were not included in the official vote.

“The votes were in a ballot box at the electorate headquarters and were missed during the official count. The votes have now been counted and added to the electorate totals,” the New Zealand Electoral Commission said.

‘We Have Corrected the Errors Found’

The commission said corrections have now been made, leading to 693 votes being added to the total party votes cast in the election.

Voter turnout overall remains the same at 78.2 percent, while candidate votes have increased by 708.

Chief electoral officer Karl Le Quesne said, “We have corrected the errors found.”

“These are small in scale and do not affect the overall results or allocation of seats. We apologise for these errors. It is disappointing they were not picked up in the quality assurance processes and falls short of our expectations.”

He said there are quality assurance steps across the counting, data entry, and reporting processes that have been applied.

“People should have confidence in the integrity of the official count and the amended results,” he added.

The National Party won 48 seats, the Labour Party gained 34 seats, the Green Party received 15 seats and ACT New Zealand got 11 seats.

Meanwhile, the New Zealand First Party received eight seats and Te Pāti Māori gained six.

Acting Electoral Commission board chair Jane Meares revealed an independent review will now take place to stop this from happening in the future.

“The Electoral Commission board will commission an independent review of the quality assurance processes in place and what improvements can be made to ensure this doesn’t happen again,” Ms. Meares said.

All current ministerial warrants in New Zealand are set to expire on Nov. 11, meaning New Zealand could be left without a government.