2019 local body election results

Live coverage at

The Herald’s full list of Mayors and Councillors

ElectionNZ results page

List of council websites and maps

When will election results be available?

Votes are processed, but not counted, as they come in. The announcement of the preliminary results will depend on the flow of the returned voting documents to electoral officers. Electoral officers have the discretion to announce progress results (i.e. votes counted to date), and some do so very soon after midday on polling day for FPP. This tends to happen more in larger areas, where there are many votes to count. The preliminary results (i.e. the count of all ordinary votes, and validated special votes) for smaller councils using FPP might be available within a few hours of the close of voting on polling day.

Under FPP, candidates’ vote tallies increase progressively as more and more votes are counted. It is possible to predict whether the uncounted votes could alter the outcome after a progress result, based on the margins between the candidates and how many votes there are left to count.

However, the nature of STV voting means that a very few votes can alter the result of an election by changing the order in which candidates are excluded and their votes transferred. As a result, it is less clear how a relatively small number of votes will affect the final result under STV. This is why progress results are generally not made in STV elections.

The Society of Local Government Managers’ electoral working party has recommended that electoral officers release preliminary results (as distinct from progress results) for STV elections as soon as practicable. If electoral officers cannot release a preliminary result by midday on the Sunday after polling day, because they have not received all the votes to process and put through the calculator for an announcement by that time, then they should consider releasing progress results sometime after midday on Sunday.

LGNZ turnout stats:

The Vote 2019 campaign has been designed to encourage more Kiwis to get involved in the Local Authority Elections. Local Authority Election turnout has been declining in many areas of New Zealand since the 1980s. This ten-month Vote 2019 campaign, which ran until the 12 October polling date, aimed to lift voter numbers above 50 per cent nationally for the first time since 1989.

View the tables below for the preliminary voter turnout statistics from the 2019 local authority elections as provided by the councils. The figures are broken into metro, rural, provincial and regional areas.  These tables will be updated with final results, including Special Votes, once all votes have been counted.

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