This Friday at 2pm (12pm AEDT), New Zealanders will find out the final results of the October 14 election. This tally will include the estimated 567,000 special votes not reported in the preliminary results on election night.
Special votes tend to take a long time to count because they include votes cast outside a voter’s home electorate. These votes need to be posted back to the home electorate and checked against the electoral roll before they can be counted.
The decision to release the results on a predetermined day three weeks after the election, rather than providing progress updates as the count is completed, has been criticised. Rolling updates during the counting process, much like Australian state and federal electoral commissions, are preferable.
