Replay · 2023 general election · loading the count…
Polls closed at 7pm.
Seats are the full MMP maths on the party votes counted so far, with each electorate's current leader taken as its winner.
The party vote
Valid party votes from the voting places counted so far. The thin tick on each bar is where the party finished in the official count. Seats are electorate + list.
Who is in on these numbers
Each party's electorate leaders, then its list in ranked order: list seats go to the highest-ranked candidates who did not win an electorate. The line moves all night.
The 72 electorates
Who leads, by how much, and how much of the electorate has been counted. Open one for every candidate, its party vote and the voting places as they report.
The country, one voting place at a time
Every voting place with a known location, coloured by the party that leads its party vote once its result is in. Pick a party above to see its share instead. Hover a dot for the place.
The pace of the count
Share of voting places reported and share of the night's votes counted, against the Electoral Commission's targets: half of voting places by 10pm, 95% by 11.30pm.
Three weeks later
What the special votes changed
Election night counts ordinary votes only. The official count adds the special votes — people enrolling late, voting outside their electorate, or overseas — about one vote in five. In 2023 they took two seats off National, gave one each to the Greens and Te Pāti Māori, and changed the winner in four electorates.
How this replay works
Every vote is real. The Electoral Commission publishes an XML results feed for the media on election night and keeps the final version online. This page uses the 2023 archive: one file per voting place with its party votes and candidate votes, plus the reference tables of parties, electorates and candidates. Summed, the voting-place files reproduce the preliminary result announced on election night to within a tenth of a point.
The clock is simulated. The archive is the official count, so its timestamps are from the weeks after the election. The replay gives each voting place an arrival time instead: smaller places tend to report first, with some noise, and the pace follows the Commission's published targets (first results before 7.30pm, half of voting places by 10pm, 95% by 11.30pm). The order is fixed, so a shared link shows the same picture.
The seat maths is live. On every update the page runs Sainte-Laguë over the party votes counted so far, with the 5% threshold, the electorate-seat exemption and overhang, taking each electorate's current leader as its winner. That is the same calculation the Commission's own results site runs. The ordinary votes here are as recounted in the official count, so a knife-edge electorate may show a slightly different margin from the one reported on the night.
Election night 2026. This page is the rehearsal for election2026.nz/live, which will play the 7 November count from the same feed as it arrives.