Interesting reading.. If only most of second year law read like that. Instead they were tedious readings of court cases, many of whom were very good at disengaging oneself.

If Labour did decide to do an election petition I suspect the chances of Labour being successful is very very minimal.

Yes I should have said that too but Mana policies would have helped low income earners so one can presume they were also targetting such people. I guess they wanted to increase the vote and who knows. Maybe they did help to get South Aucklands to vote. Except they were hardly going to vote for Mana were they instead they fell in line with Labour as those electorates have seemingly always done.

I notice a lot of Green followers after 2008 on the blogosphere also had a rather seeming weird idea as to where some of the Greens vote came from. Certain policies may be attractive to beneficiaries, low income workers, the underclass etc. But those people are actually less likely to swing their vote than the middle class urbanites where the Greens have always done well. NZ First too might have been a small factor as to why the Mana party didn't attract more votes.

Mana either needs to be a Maori or if it wants to represent more than Maori it has got to look at where the swing vote is usually from. I suggest its not West Auckland low income earners or South Aucklanders. Minto and Bradford brought in just over 200 (Minto did get 400 electorate votes) votes. Not exactly inspiring.

I am a Christchurch Central voter. I voted National and Nicky Wagner. I'm in Saint Albans, the area that gets called Merivale when you sell houses. And honestly I'm dumbfounded by the Christchurch Central result. I honestly thought Brendon Burns had done a great job after the earthquakes and would be rewarded as a result and I predicted the seat to actually do even better for Labour than 2008.

After 2008 and seeing how close it was I did think it was a seat National could target and I do think Christchurch was turning away from Labour to an extent. And will do so in the future too. I certainly can't see Christchurch being a Labour stronghold as it has been in the past. But ultimately when we had our earthquakes everything changed and therefore I thought Burns would do excellent. Clearly, that wasn't the case.

In fairness Labour and left-wing commentators are also blaming the media. You lose blame someone else for that. All pathetic in my opinion.

National has the potential to dip below 48%. In my opinion that is near disaster. Yes we'll be the government and I'm thankful for that. Turnout was dreadful. But more alarming I think is that the right-wing vote has not increased from 2008 and that is terrible. I do not understand some of the thinking that occured from commentators on both TV One and TV Three. Chris Trotter was sulking and frankly being pathetic.

National may have won but despite that it was not a good night for the right.

Has Selwyn Manning done his look into electorates this election? I loved reading in 2008 and was hoping he'd repeat it this time but haven't seen it anywhere.

That is how I've always liked to see electorate votes. And in my opinion I don't see why it couldn't be added further whereby PV could be added to the Party Vote as well. The threshold could remain at 5% in terms of the party vote but with PV parties that dip just below 5% as NZ First may well be, could be pushed up as preferences go to NZ First etc. I also think it would benefit very small parties that won't ever make the threshold so that their voters ultimately have a say in how their wasted vote will be influenced.

OMG how sad. I've been believing that for weeks ever since we first knew there would be a Mt. Albert by-election.

Actually Melissa Lee winning Mt. Albert would not see Cam Calder come back. The number of list MPs allocated to National falls since they now have an extra electorate MP.