Good morning everybody, and welcome to Elections 101.
In today’s exercise, we’ll look at a very close electoral race, very close indeed. So close that after the counting of 25,123 valid returns the winning candidate’s majority was a razor-thin 42 votes. This occurred during the 2023 General Election in the Maori electorate seat of Tamaki-Makaurau where nice Ms Kemp of Te Pati Maori prevailed over (almost) equally nice Mr Henare of the Labour Party.
In the spreadsheet sample above we can see how very close the race was. It comes from the Electoral Commision’s statistics database of ‘Advance Voting’ results by voting-place. Gosh it was tight, wasn’t it? But hang on. Do you see the anomaly too? That’s remarkable, don’t you think? It’s close all over except for one location where Ms Kemp ‘smashed-em bro’. Isn’t that interesting? I wonder what was in the water at that particular location to produce such lopsidedness? That one result, from one location, appears to have swung the entire election in Tamaki-Makaurau. That and the count of ‘Special Votes’. Hmmm. I wonder how many of those ‘Special Votes’ emanated from 81 Finlayson Ave?
Something very special there; that’s for sure.
