The official count, including specials has been released.
The Greens have picked up another seat on specials at National’s cost. Kennedy Graham will be the Greens’ ninth MP. Along with Kevin Hague, Graham brings both intellectual heft and a more ‘mainstream’ face to the Greens. Great news.
Labour was just 39 votes short of picking up another seat, also at National’s expense. Maybe if they had bothered to call up those 40 Servos volunteers for the get out the vote effort in South Auckland on election day. Or if some Labour supporters hadn’t had the bright idea of trying to help Winston over 5%. Or if the Workers’ Party, Alliance, ALC and RAM hadn’t wasted 13,000 left-wing votes. Hell, the Greens could have spared 1850 votes and still got 9 seats – maybe if Tane, Irish, and myself had endorsed Labour instead of them 🙂 Oh, well.
Anyway, that just goes to show that every vote does matter.
I’ll do some analysis on where the Left lost ground later on.
[Update: in comments, we’re told the servo volunteers were used on election day, great if that was the case but my understanding is still that the get out the vote effort in South Auckland this year was weaker than 2005]
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