Advance voting starts on October 2, with the polls closing at physical voting booths - the location of which will be released shortly - at 7pm on October 14, and provisional results are expected to start coming through from 7pm that night. All voting places will be open from 9am to 7pm and there are more than 130,000 eligible voters in the Northland region in the three electorates.
In the 2020 general election all three Northland electorates - Northland, Whangārei and Te Tai Tokerau - were won by Labour for the first time in one election as a red wave swept the party into power without the need for a coalition partner.
That election’s results saw Whangārei incumbent National Party MP Dr Shane Reti (17,392 votes) losing the seat to Labour’s Emily Henderson (17823). In the Northland electorate, incumbent National MP Matt King (16,903) lost to Labour’s Willow-Jean Prime (17,066 votes). Labour’s Kelvin Davis retained the Te Tai Tokerau seat in 2020 with 14,932 votes, more than double the 6768 votes Te Pāti Māori candidate Kapa-Kingi received.
As part of its election coverage, the Northern Advocate will be putting the hard questions to the candidates. If you have any questions for the candidates in your electorate, send them to elections@northernadvocate.co.nz. That’s also the email address to send any details of meet-the-candidate events across the region.
To help, here is some information about the election and the voting process.
■ New Zealand has 65 general electorates and seven Māori electorates. If you’re enrolled on the Māori electoral roll, you can vote for a candidate standing in the Te Tai Tokerau electorate, and if you’re enrolled in the general role, you can vote for someone standing in the Northland or Whangārei electorates, depending on where you live.
■ Under MMP, you get two votes.
One is for a party (party vote) and the other is for a person standing in your electorate (electorate vote).
Your electorate vote should go to the person you most want to represent you in Parliament. Your party vote should go to the party you want to have the most seats in Parliament.
■ Enrolling to vote is compulsory, although voting is not. If you’re eligible to enrol to vote and you live in New Zealand, you must do so. If you’re eligible to enrol to vote but you do not live in New Zealand, it’s your choice whether you enrol or not.
■ You can enrol on election day (unless you are overseas). You can enrol when you go to vote at any voting place in New Zealand – but if you enrol early, voting will be faster. If you’re overseas you must be enrolled by midnight on October 13 to be eligible to vote.
Massey University professor of politics Richard Shaw said it was important to note that we’re not really choosing the next Government on October 14, “we’re choosing the Parliament”.
While the local electorate vote would determine the person who represented their constituency, “the one that counts most is the party vote”, he said.
“Give that to the party you most want to see in power. The distribution of votes determines which party finds their way into Parliament. The process called ‘forming the Government’ involves political parties figuring out how to get to the magic number of 61 seats.”
That’s because New Zealand’s system of voting is called MMP (mixed member proportional), which usually has our Government formed by two or more parties.
Shaw said voting was important because it was the Government “who gets to set the rules we live by”.
This includes decisions about everything from tax and benefit rates to spending on health, education and roads, along with border control and the country’s defence forces.
People vote “for all sorts of weird and wonderful reasons”, Shaw said.
Key election dates:
■ September 15 - Nominations close for candidates
■ September 16 - Names of electorate and list candidates released on vote.nz
■ September 27 - Overseas voting starts; telephone dictation voting opens candidate
■ October 2 - Advance voting starts
■ October 13 - Advance voting ends; regulated period ends. All election advertising must end. Signs must be taken down by midnight.
■ October 14 - Election day. Voting places open from 9am to 7pm; preliminary election results are released progressively from 7pm on electionresults.govt.nz
■ November 3 - Official results for the 2023 general election are declared
To find out more about the election go to vote.nz
Mike Dinsdale is news director and a senior journalist who covers general news for the Advocate. He has worked in Northland for almost 34 years and loves the region.
