Who Won the New Zealand Election? 399,365 Ballots Still Hold the Answer

Mike Butterick leads by 139 votes. Kieran McAnulty trails him by that much out of 35,747 votes cast in Wairarapa, and on Sunday morning neither man can say whether he is the electorate’s next member of parliament. The count that settles it has not happened yet.

The special votes will settle Wairarapa. About 399,365 of them are still to be counted, roughly 14 per cent of all the ballots cast in the New Zealand election, and they land with the official results on 27 November. A special vote is a ballot cast outside the voter’s home electorate, or from overseas, or by someone who enrolled after writ day, or on the unpublished roll, or by dictation. About 96,947 of them are overseas or dictation votes. Electoral officials began the count on Sunday, checking the rolls and recounting the ordinary votes as they go.

The ordinary votes gave nobody a government. Labour took 710,330 party votes to National’s 706,680, a lead of 3,650. National took 42 seats to Labour’s 36. With ACT on 13 and New Zealand First on 12, the incumbent right bloc holds 67 seats in a Parliament projected at 131, one more than the 66 needed for a majority. Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori hold 57 between them. The Opportunity Party, entering Parliament for the first time, holds seven. Both big parties fell below 30 per cent of the party vote. Together they took 58.57 per cent, the lowest combined share since the proportional system began in 1996. National fell from 38.06 per cent in 2023 to 29.21 per cent. Labour rose from 26.91 per cent to 29.36 per cent, gaining barely two points of the nine National lost.

Special votes have moved seats at every recent count, and at the last three elections the movement went the same way. In 2017, National went from 58 seats on election night to 56 once the specials were counted, while Labour and the Greens each gained one, and 446,287 special votes took the Labour-Green-New Zealand First bloc from 61 seats to 63, enough to govern. In 2020, National lost two seats again. Labour took three electorates off it, Maungakiekie, Northland and Whangārei, on 493,967 special votes. In 2023, National fell from 50 seats to 48. The Greens gained one and Te Pāti Māori two, on about 567,000 special votes. National and ACT lost the majority they had held on election night. They needed New Zealand First to govern. The only time this century a National candidate has won on special votes was 2011, when Nicky Wagner took Christchurch Central after tying on the night.

The question comes down to five seats, all of them held by National, all of them inside 1,500 votes. Wairarapa, 139 votes. Hamilton East is wider, at 456 votes, with National’s Ryan Hamilton ahead of Labour’s Georgie Dansey. Whangārei, where Lloyd Budd leads Gary Payinda by 1,061. Nelson, where Blair Cameron leads Rachel Boyack by 1,210. Takanini, where Rima Nakhle leads Kharag Singh by 1,484. Tim Costley in Kāpiti, ahead by 2,077, is the sixth name on the same list. Five of them, plus Costley, are the marginal end of National’s seven-seat overhang, the extra seats it holds because it won 42 electorates on a 29.21 per cent party vote. Four more electorates sit inside 1,000 votes: Wellington Bays, Mt Roskill, Te Tai Tokerau and Hutt South.

Across 2017 to 2023, special votes went to Te Pāti Māori at 1.8 times their election-night share, to Opportunity at 1.4 times and to the Greens at 1.3 times. New Zealand First, National and ACT got 0.8 times each. SixtyOne, the results site working from the Electoral Commission’s feed, applied that lean to this year’s count as a what-if, keeping every electorate with its election-night winner. The Greens would rise to 17 seats, New Zealand First would fall to 11, Opportunity would rise to eight, and the House would grow to 132 seats, so 67 would be needed. The National-led bloc would hold 66. One short, and the crossbench would decide. Two new MPs would come in: Bhen Goodsir for the Greens, David Bainbridge-Zafar for Opportunity. One would go out: New Zealand First’s David Ashley Wilson.

This year’s pool is not the one that produced that record, and the difference cuts both ways. The Commission estimates about 399,365 special votes. In 2023 there were about 567,000. That is roughly 168,000 fewer, because enrolment closed three weeks before election day. Richard Shaw, professor of politics at Massey University, notes that this year’s specials include an unusually large number of overseas votes. One analyst in Newsroom’s live coverage warned that specials “aren’t going to be the same as we’ve seen in the past for the left by my reckoning with the changes to enrolment”. National could gain from them too: Mt Roskill and Hutt South are Labour-held seats it trails by 262 and 889 votes.

Two seats are not enough, on the preliminary numbers. The left bloc plus Opportunity reaches 64 seats, still two short of a majority, so even a leftward shift of two seats does not hand Chris Hipkins a government. It hands Qiulae Wong the decision. And an electorate flip does not simply move one seat from one bloc to the other, because it also shrinks National’s overhang and the House with it. One National electorate lost to Labour leaves the right on 66 of 130, still exactly a majority. Two leave it on 65 of 129, still exactly a majority. Three would leave it on 64 of 128, one short, with Opportunity holding the balance. It is the combination that matters. The historical party-vote lean has cost National two seats at each of the last three counts. Add two flipped electorates, and Labour, the Greens, Te Pāti Māori and Opportunity land on exactly 66 seats in a 130-seat House.

One seat could even move the wrong way for the side that wins it. In Te Tai Tokerau, Te Pāti Māori’s Aperahama Edwards leads the Greens’ Hūhana Lyndon by 436 votes. If the Green candidate flips the seat on specials, the left bloc loses a seat. Te Pāti Māori would hold four electorates instead of five, and its overhang would fall from four to three. The House would shrink from 131 to 130, and the Greens, whose total is set by their party vote, would gain nothing for it. A voter on Reddit spotted it before most of the coverage did. “You’ve also got to take into account Te Tai Tokerau,” nja5996 wrote. “However if GRN candidate flips it on specials it will actually reduce the number of seats by 1 for the left.”

“Im predicting 3 of those 5 will flip once the specials are counted, and only two are required for the left block to gain a majority of seats assuming they can pull their heads in and negotiate with OPP,” wrote AccountantJaded538 on Reddit on Saturday night, after listing the five seats and their margins himself. “Never in the history of MMP have special votes caused more than 2 seats to flip,” answered Main-Economics-162. “It’s technically / numerically possible for 3 to 5 seats to shift, but historically unprecedented and highly unlikely.” The record is on the second voice’s side, and the arithmetic is on neither’s alone: two is the most the specials have ever moved, and two electorate flips on their own would leave the right exactly on the majority line. The hope and the record meet only in the combination. The thread’s verdict on the night itself was blunter, and it was aimed at the mandate claim. “Imo it shows how divided the country is,” wrote s0cks_nz. “The coalition haven’t won any mandate here. They’ve scraped through by the skin of their teeth, which shows that what they are doing really isn’t that popular.” Luxon, who told reporters on Sunday that his coalition had a mandate and a pathway to form a government, also told New Zealanders to calm down and enjoy a break from politics for three weeks.

Qiulae Wong is 38, a former KPMG sustainability consultant, and she took over the decade-old Opportunity Party in November 2025 after responding to an ad on the recruitment site Seek. She rebranded it, and led it past the 5 per cent threshold for the first time on a platform of evidence-based centrism, a NZ$19,400 annual universal basic income and a 1.75 per cent land tax. “Shit we did it!” she told supporters on election night. She has said she will speak first with the leader of the party with the most seats. On these numbers, that is National. Its leader spent the campaign saying he would not take her call. Luxon said on Sunday it was unlikely he would need her, but that he was willing to work with her on issues where they agree. Shaw’s reading is colder: if Luxon holds to his refusal and the alternative is opposition, he will “likely be replaced as party leader (and therefore prime minister) in short order by someone who is prepared to have the difficult conversation”. Wong’s own party may not let her have it either. Its supporters would prefer a centre-left administration, its board can veto a deal, and Shaw notes that propping up a government that took the country out of the Paris Agreement, erased the Treaty of Waitangi and did away with the minimum wage would shorten the odds of Opportunity surviving as a parliamentary force.

The Parliament taking shape would be the largest since the proportional system began: 131 seats, with 11 overhang seats, beating the previous record of 123. National is the first major party under the system to win an overhang and no list seats at all, which is why its front bench has been cut down with it. Shaw names the losses: Nicola Willis and Paul Goldsmith, and, in all probability, Chris Bishop. Bishop trails Ginny Andersen by 889 votes in Hutt South, with no list seat to fall back on. A returning government would sit down with fewer and less experienced National ministers. Its coalition partners would hold a larger share of the cabinet than the 67 per cent National held in its first term.

The Commission aims to publish the official results on 27 November, with detailed results to follow by 14 December. Electorate candidates then have three working days to apply to the District Court for a recount, and the judge has a further three working days to begin one. Parliament must meet by 14 January, six weeks after the return of the writs, and there is no formal constitutional requirement for a government to have been formed by then.

In 1993, the last time a New Zealand election turned this tightly on special votes, the seat of Waitaki changed hands by 53 votes once they were counted. Labour’s Bruce Albiston had led there on election night; National’s Alec Neill took the seat, and with it National’s 50th.