Official count underway
The official count of votes in the 2023 General Election is underway, when all ordinary votes are counted again and special votes are checked and counted.
The Electoral Commission plans to release the official results on Friday 3 November, 20 days after election day. This is the same timeframe as the last election.
The preliminary count on election night is the initial count of ordinary votes cast before and on election day.
During the official count, we scrutinise the rolls to check for dual votes, count all the ordinary votes again, and check and count special votes.
Voters make a special vote when they’re not on the printed electoral roll at the voting place – for example if they’re voting outside their electorate, voting from overseas, are on the unpublished roll, or if they enrolled close to election day.
By law, we need to allow time for special votes to be returned from overseas, and for special votes cast in New Zealand to be returned to the electorate the voter is enrolled in to be counted. We check the voter is eligible to enrol before we process and count special votes.
Special declaration votes still to be counted in the 2023 General Election are estimated at 567,000. This includes an estimated 80,000 overseas and dictation votes. In 2020 there were 504,621 special votes including 62,787 overseas and dictation votes.