Geoff Neal: Massive 323 Manurewa Marae margin in tight 42 vote win

Based on the Electoral Commission’s Official Result for the Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland) Māori seat in the 2023 General Election

1. Takutai Kemp (TPM) beat Peeni Henare (Labour) by just 42 votes (0.16%) after specials came in.

2. However, at Manurewa Marae, one of more than 300 polling booths where candidate votes were recorded for this seat, and where Kemp was the CEO at the time, Kemp got 323 more candidate votes than Henare.

3. This winning Manurewa Marae margin of 323 more votes is almost 8x higher than her overall winning margin of 42 votes and 4x higher than Kemp achieved at any other polling booth in the electorate. The next highest was Te Kura Kaupapa Māori o Hoani Waititi Marae (Glen Eden), with 80 more votes for Kemp, followed by Makaurau Marae (Mangere) with 61 more votes for Kemp.

4. The turnout at Manurewa Marae was large:

1. 930 Total valid candidate votes were almost twice as many as the next polling booth – Westfield Manukau Mall with 501 votes.

2. 744 Advance votes also easily surpassed the next highest Advance polling booths – Westfield Manukau Mall with 443 and PAK’nSAVE Clendon with 441

3. 186 On day votes were 2.5x higher than On day votes at Kia Aroha College and St James Anglican Church, each recording 71 votes

5. In the next 7 largest polling booths after Manurewa Marae, the Labour candidate, Peeni Henare, won all of them.

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KEY QUESTIONS

1. Should the Te Pāti Māori candidate be disqualified from this seat and a by-election held?

2. Should marae and other places with strong partisan ties be allowed as polling booths?

3. What other penalties are required to rectify the democratic damage done and disincentise similar behaviours in the future?


ADDITIONAL NOTES:

• We included all 8 polling booths with the term ‘marae’ in them. This is to provide a comparison with other marae.
• We included the next 7 largest polling booths. We chose 7 because we compared Manurewa Marae with 7 other marae, so felt it fairest to compare with 7 non-marae, too.
• The marae and 7 other booths are both ordered by the total votes for these two candidates.
• Takutai Kemp received 10,068 (40.07%) of the valid candidate votes. Peeni Henara received 10,026 votes (39.91%). Hence the narrow 42 vote and 0.16% differential.
• The 3rd placed candidate, Darleen Tana from the Green Party, was a long way back with just 2,925 votes (11.64%), and has not part of the debate about whether the seat was unfairly won, and has also left Parliament, so was been excluded from the graph.
• We used red to represent the Labour Party and black to represent Te Pāti Māori given they are the dominant colours in their branding.
• All numbers are provisional and subject to revision.

Thank you to the Factors who helped pull this together.

SOURCE:
Electoral Commission, 2023 General Election – Official Result = https://archive.electionresults.govt.nz/electionresults_2023/statistics/votes-by-voting-place-electorate-index.html

Data published by the Electoral Commission
(c) Crown Copyright
Licensed for use under the creative commons attribution licence (BY) 4.0

Geoff Neal, a business advisor, writer, and researcher, is the founder of theFacts website HERE - where this article was sourced.