How it works
How New Zealand's MMP system turns votes into seats, and how The Count's calculator and election-night calls work.
Two votes
Every voter has two votes. The party vote decides how many seats each party gets in total. The electorate vote chooses a local MP for each of the 71 electorates (64 general and 7 Māori). The usual size of Parliament is 120 seats.
Who qualifies for seats
A party shares in the party-vote seats if it wins at least 5% of the party vote, or wins at least one electorate (often called the coat-tail rule). A party that does neither gets no seats from its party vote, even if it has a few percent.
Sharing out the 120 seats
Seats are shared among the qualifying parties in proportion to their party votes, using the Sainte-Laguë method: each party's votes are divided by 1, 3, 5, 7 and so on, and the 120 largest results win a seat each. If an independent or a non-qualifying party wins an electorate, that seat comes out of the 120 first.
Each party's electorate MPs fill its seats first; the rest go to the people on its party list, in order, skipping anyone who has already won an electorate. If a party runs out of list candidates, the extra seats stay empty.
Overhang
If a party wins more electorates than its party vote entitles it to, it keeps them all and Parliament grows: this is overhang. In 2023 Te Pāti Māori won six electorates on a party vote worth fewer seats, so Parliament had 122 members (123 after the Port Waikato by-election). The other parties keep their full share, so a government then needs a majority of the larger House.
The calculator
You set the party vote (or load a poll or the poll average) and pick a winner in each electorate; the calculator applies the rules above, exactly as the Electoral Commission does, and shows who fills each seat. You can also switch the rules (threshold, electorate rule, overhang) to see what changes.
The electorate wizard fills in winners for you. By default it takes each seat's 2023 margin and moves it by three-quarters of the change in the national party vote since 2023 (candidate votes move less than party votes), keeps very safe seats, Māori seats and seats held by smaller parties with their 2023 party, and lets sitting MPs who changed party keep their seats. You can change every one of those choices, or go through the seats one by one.
Election night: the live count
On election night (7 November 2026) The Count reads the Electoral Commission's results feed every 30 seconds or so and works out the seats from the votes counted so far. Each electorate is labelled:
- Early count: under 25% of its voting places counted. Never called.
- Leading: ahead, but not yet safe.
- Likely: at least 50% counted and the leader wins in 90%+ of our simulations.
- Projected winner: the lead is bigger than 30% of the votes still to count, plus 1,250 votes (general seats) or 2,000 (Māori seats) for special votes. The trailing candidate would have to win the rest of the count by more than 30 points and then gain more from specials than any candidate has since 2002 (1,215 votes in Maungakiekie in 2020; 1,021 in Te Tai Tokerau in 2023).
- Too close to call: every voting place counted, but the lead is within the special-vote allowance.
- Elected: the official result, declared about three weeks later.
Votes still to count is deliberately estimated on the high side. Big voting places, often advance-voting centres, can report late in the night (in the 2023 count, Tauranga still had 17% of its votes to come with 94% of voting places in), so the estimate allows for up to 5 points more of the vote being left than the share of voting places left, and never less than the seat's enrolment and 2023 turnout suggest.
Calls are our own estimates, not the Electoral Commission's. Election-night results are preliminary; special votes (about one in five votes in 2023) are counted afterwards and can change close seats and the last few party-vote seats.
Election day
Election-day rules ban anything that could influence voters while voting is open, so on 7 November the site shows only a reminder to vote until polls close at 7pm, when the results start. The electorate pages, with each electorate's candidates, stay up all day.