The Electoral Commission's chief electoral officer Karl Le Quesne said he is "incredibly frustrated" by errors in the official results for the 2023 General Election.
The agency yesterday afternoon said 620 votes in the East Coast electorate that were included in the preliminary count were not included in the official count.
The votes were in a ballot box at the electorate headquarters that were missed during the official count.
Additional errors had also been discovered, including 15 voting places with data entry errors resulting in small changes for electorate candidate results, one electorate where the data for a small number of special votes had been entered incorrectly, and five voting places entered election day votes as advance voting.
The issues follow the Electoral Commission's Tuesday announcement of party votes being recorded in the incorrect row for two voting places in Port Waikato and one voting place in Ilam.
Le Quesne joined Breakfast this morning, saying that while frustrated, he is confident the official count has now been corrected
"I'm confident that running through our quality assurance steps again we've picked up those data entry errors and have now corrected them," he said.
He added the Electoral Commission had spent two days this week looking over the results and was confident that this was the end of the mistakes.
"On Tuesday we went through the party votes by voting place, Wednesday we went through the candidate votes and the special votes, so we've gone through everything now. We just needed those two days to go through in a great deal of detail and just assure ourselves that we've corrected any errors that we've found."
An independent review has been commissioned by the Electoral Commission board into its quality assurance practices, the findings required to be presented to Parliament within six months of the election, or by April next year.
"I think that's an important next step for us to do," said Le Quesne.
"I think people can be confident about the (quality assurance practices) we've got... they did actually work, they discovered them, but there were some human errors of not picking them up and chasing them up."
Le Quesne said there are "definitely" things to be improved upon from the Electoral Commission's perspective.
"The Commission always makes recommendations to Parliament about changes that might be needed either in legislation or policy or some of the operational processes that we run. It's set up like that to continually improve how we deliver elections, so it's a really important part of the process."
The amended results have been published in the New Zealand Gazette and on www.electionresults.govt.nz, the agency said.
Recounts will take place in Nelson, Tāmaki Makaurau and Mount Albert.
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