Election night 2026 · Saturday 7 November · live from 7pm
The count, as it arrives. This page goes live when the polls close.
Until 7.00pm New Zealand daylight time on Saturday 7 November 2026, when voting ends and the first results follow.
Seats are the full MMP maths on the party votes counted so far, with each electorate's current leader taken as its winner.
How the night runs
The Electoral Commission counts the ordinary votes at each voting place and publishes them as they come in. Its targets for the night, from the 2026 media kit.
- 7.00pmVoting ends. Advance votes, counted during the day, are released first.
- by 7.30pmFirst results are expected to be entered.
- by 10.00pmHalf of all voting places reported. Progress is counted in voting places, not votes.
- by 11.30pm95% of voting places reported. Most electorates are complete around now.
- overnightThe preliminary result. Ordinary votes only: no special votes, including overseas votes.
- 27 NovOfficial results. Special votes are about one vote in five; in 2023 they moved two seats and four electorates.
The party vote
Valid party votes from the voting places counted so far, biggest party first. The thin tick on each bar is the final polling average. 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 71 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. Or colour by the leading candidate in each place's own electorate. Hover a dot for the place, click it to open its electorate. Zoom in and the coastline switches to the 1:50k survey, then the roads appear.
Scroll, pinch or double-click to zoom; drag to pan. Coastline from Natural Earth; at street scale, Topo50 coastlines, lakes, rivers and roads from the LINZ Data Service (CC BY 4.0).
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.
Where the numbers come from
The Electoral Commission's results feed. On election night the Commission publishes an XML feed of every voting place's party votes and candidate votes, alongside its results website at electionresults.govt.nz. This site reads that feed every twenty seconds and does its own arithmetic on it. Nothing here is a projection from a sample: every number is the Commission's count so far.
What "so far" means. Early in the evening the picture is partial and can move. The page always shows how much of the country has reported. The seat maths 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, which is how the Commission's own site does it. Electorate totals are taken from the Commission's electorate files, so they match its site; the voting-place detail underneath may lag them by a few seconds.
Wind it back. The scrubber replays the night so far from the voting-place results as they arrived; the Live button returns to now. The 2023 replay runs this same page over the full 2023 count.