New Zealand electorates

[3][n 1] The electoral boundaries for the inaugural 1853 general election were drawn up by the governor, George Grey, with the authority for this coming from the New Zealand Constitution Act 1852.

[4] After the initial election, there were eight redivisions carried out by members of the general assembly (as the lower house was known at the time).

In 1887, the responsibility for reshaping electorates was given to a Representation Commission and that arrangement has remained to this day.

Up until 1981, the boundaries of the Māori electorates were determined by the governor or governor-general, when that responsibility was also transferred to the Representation Commission.

The country quota inflated the number of the electoral population outside of cities and certain towns by some percentage.

[6] Since the introduction of MMP for the 1996 election, the number of South Island electorates is fixed at 16 as stipulated in the legislation.

In October 2024, Statistics New Zealand announced that population changes necessitated reducing the number of North Island general electorates by one, bringing the total number of North Island general electorates to 48.

The total number of list seats has thus declined from 55 to 48 since the introduction of mixed-member proportional voting in the 1996 general election.

[2] This has caused the number of list seats in Parliament to decline as the population is experiencing "northern drift" (i.e. the population of the North Island, especially around Auckland, is growing faster than that of the South Island) due both to internal migration and to immigration.

[13] An electorate may be named after a geographic region, landmark (e.g. a mountain) or main population area.

The compass point reference usually follows the name of the main population centre, e.g. Hamilton East.

Only persons presumed to have equal Māori and European ancestry (so-called half-castes) had a choice of roll.

Boundaries were last changed in 2019 and 2020 for the 2020 election, with Clutha-Southland, Dunedin North, Dunedin South, Helensville, Hunua, Manukau East, Port Hills and Rodney being abolished and replaced either by new electorates, or by surrounding electoral districts.