The Electoral Commission has released amended official results for the 2023 General Election.

Checks of party, electorate and special votes have been completed and there are no changes to the overall results, successful candidates or allocation of seats.

On Tuesday 7 November the Commission announced it had found three voting places where there were data entry errors for the party vote results.

The following additional data entry errors have been found.

• 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.
• Five voting places entered election day votes as advance voting. This did not affect the total numbers of votes for parties or candidates.

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 and were missed during the official count. The votes have now been counted and added to the electorate totals.

Corrections have been made, resulting in 693 votes being added to the total number of party votes cast in the election. Candidate votes have increased by 708. Turnout remains unchanged at 78.2%.

None of these errors affect the electorates where judicial recounts are underway.

“There are quality assurance steps across the counting, data entry and reporting processes that have been applied. People should have confidence in the integrity of the official count and the amended results,” says Karl Le Quesne, Chief Electoral Officer.

“We have corrected the errors found. These are small in scale and do not affect the overall results or allocation of seats. We apologise for these errors. It is disappointing they were not picked up in the quality assurance processes and falls short of our expectations,” says Karl Le Quesne.

“The Electoral Commission board will commission an independent review of the quality assurance processes in place and what improvements can be made to ensure this doesn’t happen again,” says Jane Meares, Acting Board Chair.

The following table sets out the amended results.

*Includes 16,267 party informal votes and 16,631 disallowed votes.

Next steps

The amended results will be published in the New Zealand Gazette and on www.electionresults.govt.nz today.

Judicial recounts are to be held in the Nelson, Mt Albert and Tāmaki Makaurau electorates.

After the recounts, the Electoral Commission will return the writ to the Clerk of the House of Representatives, allocate list seats in the presence of party scrutineers and declare by Gazette Notice the election of list members of Parliament.

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