This is also a positive sign for any democracy and we compare favourably with the MMP election held in Germany on the same day with a 76 per cent turnout and the most recent American presidential election where only 57 per cent of enrolled electors bothered to participate.
We also saw a record 47 per cent of those voting cast their vote before election day, a large increase when compared with the previous general election where 30 per cent took advantage of early voting opportunities.
This phenomenon must change the way politicians approach elections as it means that parties are addressing an audience which is shrinking as the campaign progresses. It's akin to preaching in a church where the congregation starts walking out the door the minute you open your mouth to begin your sermon.
It must also strongly influence the way political parties organise election campaigns as it surely means that there is a much wider opportunity for strong local organisations to target reluctant voters and encourage them to get out and support a party they are only lukewarm about.
The third point of interest and difference was a big increase in the number of special votes. In the 2014 general election 331,000 special votes were cast but this year that number leapt to 446,000 or 17 per cent of all who voted.
The inclusion of these votes cost the National Party two of the seats it had apparently won on election night which, of course, means that these special votes favoured the Green and Labour parties, both of whom gained an extra seat.
National's Nicola Willis, a Wellington public servant, and Maureen Pugh, a former Westland District Mayor, were deposed in favour of the Greens' Golriz Ghahraman, an Iranian refugee who became a successful lawyer, and Labour's Angie Warren-Clark, another lawyer who has been managing a women's refuge in Tauranga.
This is the second time Maureen Pugh has been nudged out by a Green candidate on the special votes but it's a fair bet that she'll be back in Parliament quite soon. If a report which emerged late last week was correct a National list MP will be departing before too long and Ms Pugh will be back.
This two-seat loss for National means that a Labour/Green New Zealand First combination would have a relatively comfortable majority in Parliament as opposed to the chancy one-seat margin it had before special votes were counted.
The obvious fact that the National Party did relatively poorly in the special vote count indicates that the Labour and the Green parties were better organised than National on the ground.
It is person-to-person activity that is responsible for many of these votes and it is here that National has been found wanting and not for the first time.
This aspect of campaigning has long been campaign supremo Steven Joyce's major deficiency and if National finally finds itself in opposition for the next three years it will need to look at how the party can do better in this area of campaigning in 2020.
Overseas voting also ticked up significantly, from 40,000 in 2014 to 61,000 this year. It's likely that the ability to effectively vote online improved participation from those away from home.
You can now cast an overseas vote (after completing a witnessed special vote declaration) by uploading voting forms then printing, scanning and emailing in the completed vote.
This amounts to an experiment in online voting of sorts and the incoming government should have a close look at how this voting system worked in its normal post-election review.
It's surely only a matter of time before the security issues which have stymied online voting up till now are resolved and you and I can vote from our living rooms, like our relatives in Sydney.
Mike Williams grew up in Hawke's Bay. He is CEO of the NZ Howard League and a former Labour Party president. All opinions are his and not those of Hawke's Bay Today.
