Click here to launch the dashboard
New Zealand's next general election is on 7 November, and the noise around it is already building: policy announcements, early polling, the usual speculation about who can form a government. Before getting pulled into all of that, I wondered what insights we could get from looking at the data from the last election.
The Electoral Commission publishes detailed turnout and results data from the 2023 election, but it sits across two separate sites and comes down mostly to statistics tables — a results and statistics page and a separate voter turnout page. Getting a real feel for what happened means working through them spreadsheet by spreadsheet, which isn't something most people have the patience for in the middle of an election cycle already generating plenty of its own noise.
I've written before about how far Claude has come at turning a messy spreadsheet into something you can actually explore, so I fed it the Electoral Commission's turnout and results data and built an interactive dashboard on top of it — the kind of thing that would otherwise have meant a proper BI tool and an afternoon of pivot tables.
What the Tabs Show
- Overview — headline KPIs, turnout by age band, and the highest and lowest turnout electorates.
- Turnout by Age — nationwide turnout across all 11 age bands, as both a rate and raw voter/non-voter numbers, with the exact figures in a table.
- Electorates — every electorate in one sortable, searchable table, filterable to General or Māori seats.
- Māori vs General Seats — the turnout gap between roll types, broken down by age band and by electorate.
- Election Results — seats won by party, vote share by party, turnout against winning margin, and a full results table.
- Electorate Explorer — pick any electorate to see its age profile, winner, and party vote split.
I've put the dashboard on its own full-screen page rather than squeezing it into a blog layout, so there's room to actually use it. Open it up, flick between the tabs, hover any chart for exact figures, or jump straight to Electorate Explorer and look up your own seat.
Open the Turnout & Results Dashboard →
Source: Electoral Commission of New Zealand — 2023 general election turnout and results data.