About leaderscan

Whose side is it on?

Everybody’s. leaderscan recommends no party and no candidate. It accepts no donations and no advertising, and it is not connected to any party, candidate, or campaign.

Where the site tells a story — the one-vote scenario — the parties are invented, on purpose. Putting hypothetical policies in the mouths of real parties would make the site an argument for somebody, and it is meant to be an argument for nobody. The electorates, the map, and every rule the story runs on are real.

Where the numbers come from

• Every MMP election, 1996–2023, from the Electoral Commission’s own official returns (electionresults.govt.nz and its archive). 1996 survives only as a scanned PDF; those figures were transcribed by hand and are checked against the totals the document prints itself.
• The seat counts are computed, not copied. The site’s engine implements the Electoral Act 1993 (sections 191 to 193): the 5% threshold, the one-electorate exception, the Sainte-Laguë count, and overhang. It reproduces all 10 official results exactly, party by party, and that check runs automatically every time the site is built.
• Electorate boundaries are Stats NZ’s (CC BY 4.0), trimmed to the coastline using Natural Earth data.
• Election dates are the Electoral Commission’s, from vote.nz.

What it does not claim

• Seats, not governments. When the site shows a Parliament that might have been, the seats are arithmetic and can be stated exactly. Who would have governed cannot: governments are formed in negotiations that no calculation can rerun.
• One vote is a special case. Almost every vote in almost every election changes nothing on its own, and no animation makes that untrue. The one-vote scenario is built on one of the few places where a single ballot really can be decisive: a tied electorate, which under section 179 is decided by drawing lots. That has never happened in New Zealand.
• The last seat is not a knife-edge. In 2023 the final seat to be allocated was 15,971 party votes from changing hands — real leverage for a large group, but not a single voter.
• “What if” means one fact changed. The historical levers move one electorate seat and recount. Everything else about that election — every vote — stays as it was.

Privacy

No analytics, no tracking, no advertising. The quiz remembers your streak in your own browser and nowhere else. If you choose to create an account, we keep the email address and a one-way hash of your password, and a sign-in cookie that does nothing but keep you signed in.

Who

leaderscan is the first part of a longer project exploring how voters could deliberate openly and coordinate on top of the voting system we already have — starting with understanding that system properly.

Spotted an error? That is the one thing this site cannot afford, so please say.