Election integrity is key to democracy, offering confidence that the will of the people has been respected.
So it’s not ideal when headlines emerge that some errors have been detected in election results. It’s even less ideal when those errors are picked up by the media (in this case, the NZ Herald), and not by the organisation tasked with running the election.
The Electoral Commission maintains the errors will have little impact on the overall result. But what mistakes were made? What happens next? And what steps are being taken to avoid similar situations in the future?
Here’s what you need to know.
How are votes counted in NZ’s elections?
All votes are counted by hand in New Zealand, according to the Electoral Commission.
The vote totals at each voting place are recorded on a certificate of results that is signed by the returning officer and a Justice of the Peace.
Those results are then entered into the Electoral Commission’s Election Management System, which records the results. It was at this stage of the process that several data entry errors took place.
What were those errors?
Out of 10,000 counts that took place around the country, data entry errors were picked up in three booths – two in the Port Waikato electorate and one in the Ilam electorate.
Some party votes were recorded in the wrong rows for each of these voting places.
For example, in the Pukekohe Intermediate voting booth, 505 votes were assigned to the Leighton Baker Party, when they should have been allocated to the National Party on the next row down.
How did these errors happen?
These were human errors, according to Chief Electoral Officer Karl Le Quesne.
He told Breakfast today that the data entry person “has just missed the zero in each case”.
As you can see in this example of the results incorrectly recorded in the Port Waikato electorate, it appears a zero has been missed for the Leighton Barker Party, which has had a knock-on effect for the parties in the list after it.
Do these errors suggest anything underhand has taken place?
The Electoral Commission believes these are simply human errors, Le Quesne said.
“There’s no pattern to them, they don’t favour any particular party - we think these were genuine mistakes,” he said.
“Out of 10,000 counts that had to be done ... just to pick up three, we don’t think there’s a pattern there.”
Why weren’t these errors detected before now?
The Electoral Commission does have checks and balances in place but they didn’t catch these errors.
“Before we publish the results, we run a programme that just identifies anything that looks odd and we do pick things up like this,” Le Quesne said.
“But we missed these three, so we’re really disappointed about that.”
What happens next?
The certificates for the affected results will be updated and again signed by the returning officer and a Justice of the Peace. Scrutineers who were present for the official counts can also be present when these results are updated.
The amended results will then be declared and published in the New Zealand Gazette.
A full check of all voting place results is also taking place, Le Quesne said.
Steps will then be taken to ensure these errors are not repeated.
“The [Electoral] Commission’s Board is going to commission an [independent] review ... right across our quality assurance processes, just to see what we need to do to improve those so it doesn’t happen again,” Le Quesne said.
Do these errors affect the election results?
Le Quesne said this doesn’t affect the results in a significant way, and doesn’t change the allocation of seats in parliament.
Oh, and while we’re at it - do we have a government yet?
No.
National, ACT and New Zealand First are still negotiating a coalition deal.
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