No more Maori seats, one more North Island seat

Statistics NZ has announced that for the 2008 and 2011 elections, there will be 47 North Island seats (up one), 16 South Island seats and seven Maori seats for a total of 70. The number of list seats (excluding overhangs) reduces from 51 to 50. Over the lifetime of MMP they have reduced from 55 to 50.

The electoral quotas for each are below, followed by the minimum and maximum using the 5% tolerance.:

South Island 57,562, 54,684 to 60,440
North Island 57,243, 54,381 to 60,105
Maori 59,583, 56,604 to 62,562

It wasn't even a close call. The Maori electoral is 417,081 which divided by the SI quota of 57,562 is 7.25. They need it to be above 7.5 to get an eight seat. They were around 14,000 electors short.

The extra NI seat was also clearly there. The NI electoral population is 2,690,427 which divided by SI quota is 46.74 and they only need 46.5 for the extra seat.

In terms of impact on existing boundaries, there will be quite a bit. In the NI 21 electorates are outside the 5% tolerance. In the SI, 9/16 seats are outside the tolerance and for Maori seats 3/7.

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