The electoral commission is “disappointed” after a number of counting “errors” weren’t identified after this year’s election, seeing some parties get more votes than they should have.
Yesterday evening, the commission identified “a small number” of data entry errors in the official election results.
Some party votes were recorded in the incorrect row for two voting places in Port Waikato and one voting place in Ilam.
While the errors won’t affect the final makeup of Parliament, chief electoral officer Karl Le Quesne told Breakfast he was still “really disappointed” the mistakes were made, once again apologising to voters.
“We missed these in our checks, and I want to apologise for not picking up these checks.
“What we’ve done since we discovered them is we’ve gone through all the party counts to check if there were any others, and we’ve only found the three mentioned.”
He said the commission has also looked at candidate votes but hasn’t found other errors. They expect to finish their checks later today.
Le Quesne said that normally, these kinds of mistakes are picked up before the release of final results.
“The main thing we wanted to do is to make it really clear that we’ve found these, be transparent, that people know what we’re fixing them, and we’re doing some further checks,” he said.
The commission’s board will now issue a review “so this doesn’t happen again".
He said all three cases were “human error” where “the data entry person has just missed the zero in each case”.
“And then put the numbers against the wrong parties from there, so they kinda got the zero out of order.
“That appears to be what happened.”
In Pukekohe, numbers were entered into the “wrong cell” on a spreadsheet.
He said the issues “should have been picked up”, which is why the commission is launching an inquiry.
He’s also confident the errors were not made intentionally.
“There’s no pattern to them. It doesn't favour any particular party.
“These were genuine mistakes,” Le Quesne said.
National's Christopher Luxon said: "As I’ve already said, there are a lot of good questions to be asked and answered after a Government is formed about the Electoral Commission and what we learnt from the election. I’d expect this to form part of that."
Labour leader and outgoing Prime Minister Chris Hipkins said he hopes the commission will "be going back and double, triple, quadruple checking to make sure that there aren't any other mistakes".
"I do think the New Zealand public, in terms of the integrity of our elections, should be able to expect that the Electoral Commission will be more thorough and have better checks and balances in place to make sure these sorts of mistakes don't happen."
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