The Herald reports:

The Electoral Commission is undertaking “a full check” of the country’s voting resultsafter a Herald investigation led to three booths being found to have wrongly assigned hundreds of votes to fringe parties, while the National Party received none.

The commission has admitted a data entry error led to hundreds of votes being assigned to the Leighton Baker Party and the New Conservatives.

“A full check of all voting place results is being undertaken immediately to establish if there are any other transcription errors,” the commission said.

This is hugely concerning. Errors in the preliminary count are to be expected, but multiple errors in the final results are disturbing.

Even worse the errors may have never been detected if it were not for a journalist.

And the notion that wrong results have been declared because of data entry errors is also concerning. Does no one check and audit the data entry?

Chief Electoral Officer Karl Le Quesne said the number of votes involved was low and had little impact on the party vote.

“It does not affect the overall results, successful candidates or allocation of seats at all.”

Quesne said some party votes were recorded in the incorrect “row” for two voting places in the Port Waikato electorate and one voting place in Ilam.

At the Pukekohe Intermediate voting station in the Port Waikato electorate, 505 votes were incorrectly assigned to the Leighton Baker Party when they should have gone to National.

The Electoral Commission seems to be minimising the severity of this issue. Election results should not be dependent on data entry errors not occurring.

Acting Electoral Commission Board chairwoman Jane Meares said she has full confidence in the integrity of the election process and the results.

“A large amount of data needs to be entered to produce the results for a general election, and some mistakes due to human error can occur. However, the board will commission an independent review of the quality assurance processes in place,” Meares said.

How can you have full confidence when multiple errors occurred in the final results?

This comes on top on other issues such as the enrolment system crashing on election day, ballot paper shortages etc.

There is always a select committee review of each general election. I wonder if something more is needed this time, such as a full external review of the Electoral Commission by a panel of international electoral experts.

Few people realised Kelvin Davis was actually the Labour Party Deputy Leader as he wasn’t trusted to be Deputy Prime Minister. Finally Labour has ended the farce and Davis has resigned, with Sepuloni replacing him.

I suspect Davis will retire before the 2026 election, as he lost his electorate seat. Highly likely to go also are Grant Robertson, David Parker and possibly also Ginny Andersen and Willie Jackson.

David Seymour released:

“Green MP Chloe Swarbrick must explain why she is repeating statements from the terrorist organisation Hamas’ charter,” says ACT Leader David Seymour.

“Chloe Swarbrick was videoed leading a chant of ”From the river to the sea” at the same rally where Labour MP Phil Twyford was forced off the stage after saying he condemns the violence against civilians by Hamas. The phrase appears in the Hamas charter and there is a large group of people, at the very least, who believe it means no Israel and even no Jewish people.

“UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has condemned the use of this phrase, while UK Labour suspended an MP for using it last week. Meanwhile in New Zealand the Jewish community lives in fear of anti-semitism and must watch as political leaders repeat it with no accountability.

Hamas terrorists slaughtered 1,400 Jews just a few weeks ago, to try and implement their vision of “From the river to the sea”. It is amazing the most of the media have given Swarbrick a free pass for this.

Now we have final results I have done the first of what will be a dozen or so posts on my Patreon analysing the results. I’ll cover at both an area level and an electorate level how each of the main eight parties did in 2023, and how it changed from 2020.

One interesting aspect from my initial post is that the centre right parties (Nat, ACT, NZF) beat the centre left parties (Lab., Greens, TPM) by a huge 19% in Auckland, 17% in provincial seats and 36% in rural seats. However in Wellington the CL beat the CR by an also huge 19%. This reinforces that Wellington is very very different to the rest of New Zealand.

National’s party vote increased 12.5% and its electorate vote by 7.7%.

The overall party vote for the right increased 17.0% and the left fell 17.5%.  So in 2020 the left won by 23% and in 2023 they lost by 11%.

ACT’s party vote went up 1.1% but electorate vote 3.5%.

The Greens’ party vote went up 3.7% and electorate vote 1.0%

The Parliament of 122 MPs has a record 32 who are Māori. This represents 26% of Parliament, which is approximately twice the 13.7% of the adult population who are Māori. This is a good thing that Māori New Zealanders are so well represented, and contradicts the narrative that the system is somehow hostile to Māori.

So who makes up the 32 MPs. Let’s break it down by the six parties.

Labour – Nine MPs out of 34 (26%). Labour has seven List MPs who are Māori, one Māori seat and one Māori MP who won a general seat.

Greens – Six MPs out of 15 (40%). Five List MPs and one Māori MP who won a general seat.

Te Pāti Māori – Six MPs out of six (100%). Six Māori seat MPs.

National – Five MPs out of 48 (10%). All five won general seats.

NZ First – Four MPs out of eight (50%). All List MPs.

ACT – Three MPs out of 11 (27%). One Māori MP who won a general seat and two List MPs.

This shows that there is no unified view on behalf of Māori. Five of the six parties have a greater proportion of Māori MPs than the adult population, and one has slightly fewer.

National is the party that is most successful at selecting Māori candidates in general seats.

Te Pāti Māori of course holds the most Māori seats.

Labour has the most List MPs who are Māori.

NZ First has the highest proportion of their caucus Māori, after Te Pāti Māori.

The Herald reports:

Peters said NZ First wanted negotiations to be conducted with urgency.

“What can we agree on … we can’t all get what we want, we have to get a sound much much better government underway,” Peters told the Platform.

The NZ First leader said the most useful thing was for National, Act and NZ First to all get in the room together as opposed to having separate conversations.

The desire to have direct three-way talks is a very positive thing. If National had to negotiate separately with ACT and NZ First, it would be more time consuming and challenging. But if all three parties are willing to meet together, that is the best way to do it.

It may also be the first time it has happened. Off memory the main party in the past has only negotiated with individual parties, rather than collectively.

1. National 38.1% (-0.8% from provisional), 48 (-2) seats
2. Labour 26.9% (nc), 34 (nc) seats
3. Greens 11.6% (+0.8%), 15 (+1)seats
4. ACT, 8.6% (-0.4%), 11 (nc) seats
5. NZ First, 6.1% (-0.4%), 8 (nc) seats
6. Te Pāta Māori, 3.1% (+0.5%), 6 (+2) seats

Electorates that changed party from the provisional results are:

• Tāmaki Makaurau from Labour to TPM
• Te Tai Tokerau from Labour to TPM
• Nelson from National to Labour
• Te Atatu from National to KLabour

Parliament will have 123 seats so 62 needed to govern. National and ACT are 59 seats (and 60 probably after Port Waikato) so need NZ First who bring the Government to 68 seats and 55 seats for the opposition.

Stuff reports:

Incoming prime minister Christopher Luxon has responded to potential legal action by the Mongrel Mob on his party’s gang policy, saying it’s “lovely that they want to engage in that process”.

The Mongrel Mob is seeking legal advice regarding the National Party’s gang policy, as the party is set to crack down on gangs once they enter government.

National has a four-pronged plan to address gangs; it includes a ban on gang patches and insignia in public places, dispersal notices, a new police gang unit, and tougher sentences for gang members.

It must be hard for the Mongrel Mob having had their preferred government lose office.

Let me be 100% clear. To appoint David Seymour or Brooke van Velden to a role as important as the Minister of Education, in the current context, would be a disaster. Neither or them have the knowledge or charismatic ability to lead the sector through change that needs to have our parenting and schooling leading the world in six years.

Seymour was an architect of the Charter Schools model and – while good things were done through the expertise of Karen Poole, Nick Hyde and Raewyn Tipene – it was so poorly implemented that only 11 schools got going and were easy targets for Labour and the unions when they regained power.

Be in no doubt … out education system is in crisis and this is a sweep the table and start again moment. I would much rather Seymour has the symbolism of Deputy PM than the actual effect of Minister of Education.

I spoke to Michael Laws on this today.

Stuff reports:

Crown Law won’t appeal the home detention sentence of a man who attacked a dog-walker with a samurai sword, leaving him lying bleeding in a ditch.

I blogged previously on this case. It’s an obscenely light sentence. So much work needs to be done to reform the legal system, and that includes Crown Law appealing more light sentences.

Stuff reports:

Camp Chippy is feeling confidently chipper that their guy has the numbers to retain the leadership of the Labour Party and there’s a desire to call for a vote to cement Chris Hipkins’ dominance as soon as reasonably possible. …

Some in the caucus are grumbling, angry with Hipkins for prioritising centrist ‘bread and butter’ policies at the expense of Labour Party ‘bread and butter’ ideology. 

But talk of David Parker moving against Hipkins isn’t being treated as a particularly serious threat by those in camp Chippy.

I think there is at least a 95% chance Hipkins will be re-elected Leader in a few weeks. But I also think there is almost as great a chance he won’t be leader by the next election.

Hipkins will be an effective Opposition Leader, but Opposition Leaders who are relentlessly negative often become quite unpopular – as happened with Goff, Cunliffe and Little. Hipkins default mode is to attack. He will do well at putting pressure on a new Government, but I suspect he will become too unpopular with the public and Labour will then replace him probably in 2025.

The Daily Mail reports:

A furious row has broken out after Metropolitan Police officers were filmed pulling down posters of Israeli children kidnapped by Hamas during the terror group’s barbaric October 7 attack.

Two officers stripped the outside of Cullimore Chemist in Edgware, North London of flyers of the missing innocents after receiving calls from residents concerned about tension within the community.

Some locals in the area, which is home to a sizeable Jewish community, have slammed the officers over their ‘disgusting actions’. But the Met has insisted they were merely taking steps to ‘stop issues escalating’ and to ‘avoid community tension’. 

This is disgusting. The rights of Jews to highlight the 200+ kidnapped children and adults has been demoted by the Met as being less important than not upsetting people who think kidnapping Jewish children is a legitimate tactic≥

The Waikato Times reports:

The body established to investigate potential miscarriages of justice in New Zealand has referred just one case to appeal since being formed in 2020 – while in the UK its equivalent quashed 100 convictions in just one year.

That points to a “wonderful initiative” that lacks resources, according to Waikato University senior law lecturer Dr Anna Brennan.

However, the Te Kāhui Criminal Cases Review Commission chief executive Parekawhia McLean said they are in fact ahead of operational time frames.

I was so pleased when the Labour Government established this body as cases such as Peter Ellis showed that we needed an institution dedicated to reviewing dodgy convictions.

But something has gone badly wrong with just one case referred to the Court of Appeal on three years. The claim it lacks resources seem credulous as it has spent $15 million over three years.

Andrea Vance writes:

There is something sorely lacking – in addition to common sense – from Wellington City Council’s decision to pour more cash into the over-budget, under-managed Town Hall project.

A financial impact report.

Exactly. How much will rates have to increase to fund this white elephant?

In the absence of any transparency, and in fear of another stroke-inducing rates bill, three residents recently commissioned analysis from Castalia, which used public documents to assess the state of the books. The economists concluded the council is about $1bn short, and will exceed its debt cap.

It’s outrageous that three residents had to commission their own advice, because the Council won’t tell us.

Democracy dies in darkness. Wellington City Council is addicted to spending, pumping ratepayers for cash with little regard for transparency or accountability. If they can’t stop, there must be an intervention.

The best intervention would be an election!