Analysis: New Zealanders are lucky to live in a country where vote count errors aren’t used to undermine an election’s integrity, writes Q+A presenter Jack Tame.
Spare a thought for Leighton Baker.
With just 2106 ballots in the election, representing 0.07% of the total party vote, the Leighton Baker Party finished roughly 140,000 votes short of the 5% threshold it needed to get to parliament.
But what would be interpreted by many as an underwhelming election result for the Leighton Baker Party turned out to be even more so, after the NZ Herald revealed the Electoral Commission had misallocated hundreds of votes.
It eventually emerged data entry mistakes meant incorrect numbers were recorded for candidates and parties in over a dozen locations.
The 505 party votes originally recorded for the Leighton Baker Party at Pukekohe Intermediate School were correctly reallocated to National instead.
From third-to-last on the original results, the amended results were enough to nudge the Leighton Baker Party down to second-to-last in the final tally.
Headlines the Electoral Commission didn’t need
While the misallocated votes were not enough to materially alter the election outcome, they have contributed further to criticism and scrutiny of the Electoral Commission’s operations.
There were more special votes cast in 2023 than in any other election. Although voter turnout was significantly down on the 2020 election, this year’s election recorded almost 100,000 more special votes on the election three years ago.
It was the first election in which new voters were able to enrol and vote on the day and was complicated by the number of voters who applied to switch to the Māori roll after the July deadline.
Although the Electoral Commission took the same amount of time as it usually does to process and publish the special vote results, the importance of the specials to the final election result and the potential make-up of the next government prolonged our collective wait.
Prime Minister-elect Christopher Luxon says he thinks the tallying of special votes should be faster. The Electoral Commission has also ordered a review into its spreadsheet errors.
All that being said, we’re fortunate to live in a country where the politician who was arguably most affected by the error has not used the incident to undermine the integrity of the overall results.
If this kind of error had been made in other countries, one can only imagine how it might have been used by an opportunistic politician to sow distrust in the democratic system.
Not so Baker. On being informed of the error and the likelihood his party would be stripped of almost 20% of its total votes, he took a dignified position.
“It shows that although systems can have faults, at least there are enough checks and balances to pick them up,” he said.
Good on you, Leighton Baker. You mightn’t have made it to parliament but it doesn’t mean you’re not a winner.
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