The specials election

by frog

Well, if the only election held was the specials election, then we’d be looking at a Labour-Green majority government. How so? Well, if you compare the election night results with the final election results, you see that Labour and the Greens won a clear majority of the special votes.

On election night, the total vote count was 2,052,813 on the Chief Electoral Officer’s (CEO) results website. Now, it stands at 2,286,190. That’s a difference of 233,377 votes. These votes went as follows:

Labour: 102,894 (44.09%)
National: 80,139 (34.34%)
Greens: 16,904 (7.24%)
NZ First: 10,779 (4.62%)
Maori Party: 7,775 (3.33%)
United: 5,255 (2.25%)
Act: 3,395 (1.45%)
Progressives: 1,817 (0.78%)

So, a Parliament just based on the specials would have had a Labour-Green Government with a clear majority, and NZ First under the threshold

The ten-point gap between Labour and National suggests that Labour picked up a sizeable chunk of the student vote – students being more likely to cast specials than non-students. Another interesting fact is that had Labour and National’s specials results been reversed, National would have won the most votes overall. That is, had National won specials battle by 102,894 votes to 80,139, then Don Brash’s party would have had 912,568 votes overall, compared to 912,564 votes for Labour. I wonder what would have happened then? Would Winston Peters and Peter Dunne been swayed by a lead of four votes? If so, would Labour be scrambling round for a recount?

N.B. The 233,377 votes I identified as the difference between the election night and the final results doesn’t line up with either the 218,000 special votes the CEO claimed existed in the two weeks since election day, or with the 248,677 special votes that the CEO claims there were in its press release today. There’s probably a simple explanation for this discrepancy – I just can’t think of it right now.