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[gfsoul]

The special votes won't be counted for nearly a fortnight, so we'll all be guessing till then. Today I saw Don Brash speculating that the Greens might end up below the 5% threshold. Looking at the numbers, though, that is practically impossible. Special votes, as everyone keeps saying, tend to favour the centre-left parties, and the Greens in

Comments

[tigerpig]

you're so cleaver. what the hell are you doing on my friends list wuth all this smart insightful stuff?

[secretpassage]

I'm wondering about ACT's pre-election claim that "National needs Rodney to form a government!". If Rodney hadn't won Epsom, ACT wouldn't have got any seats at all, so I'm wondering who that extra seat would have ended up going to.

[gfsoul]

On the election-night numbers, one seat would have gone to Labour and one to the Progressives, but the specials could still have changed things a bit. It's a shame more Epsom lefties didn't vote strategically. Comparing the party votes to the candidate votes, about 3,000 Labour supporters voted for Richard Worth, and about 400 Green supporters. If even half of the other 6,000-odd Labour/Green voters had realised neither Stuart Nash nor Keith Locke had a chance, and they were really voting for or against Rodney Hide, ACT would have been out. On the other hand, about 8,000 of the 18,000 National voters split their vote. I guess that's not such a different proportion. Dylan didn't help - he voted Labour/Hide, because he likes him, for some reason, as long as he's not in government.