According to the Electoral Commission “The target to release the Official Results of the 2017 General Election is 2pm on Saturday 7 October 2017.” A blogger at Cut Your Hair has crunched the numbers and sees only two plausible outcomes:
Realistic possibilities for Parliament post-specials (all two of them)
…
On the basis of past election results since 19992, there are only two likely scenarios for how the preliminary seat allocations in Parliament will change after special votes are counted:Golriz Ghahraman (Green) is in. Nicola Willis (National) is out. This is what will happen if the special vote results are like what they’ve been most MMP elections in NZ. On this scenario, A Nat-NZF government would have 66/120 seats. A Lab-NZF-Green government would have 62/120.
Golriz Ghahraman (Green) and Angie Warren-Clark (Labour) are in. Nicola Willis and Maureen Pugh (both National) are out. This is what will happen if the special votes are like what they were like last election. On this scenario, a Nat-NZF government would have 65/120 seats. A Lab-NZF-Green government would have 63/120. [my emphasis]…
Read on for lots of crunchy spreadsheets.
So was this election most like “most MMP elections” (1 seat change) or most like last election (2 seats)?
There remains a (mathematically unlikely) possibility that this election is a whole new beast, that the rush of late enrollments contains a mini “youth quake” resulting in a 3 seat swing. Don’t pin your hopes on it!
Certain commentators have been trying to paint the left into a corner on the specials:
But it will ultimately be for nothing if the Labour/Greens block can’t pick up a couple more seats via special votes to legitimise their position above a one seat majority with New Zealand First, Dann said.
I suppose Dann regards the minority government of the last 3 years as illegitimate then? The truth is that whatever the outcome of the specials, winning confidence and supply votes in parliament is all that matters. Even if specials result in no changes, 61 gets it done.
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