History has gaps.
We show ours.

Modern candidate coverage

These counts come from the records currently held for each MMP election. Electorate candidacies and party-list entries are counted separately; a person may appear in both. Counts alone do not establish complete candidate coverage or verified party affiliations. Zero means no records are held here, not that no candidates stood.

What is available

• 1853 onwards: source-recorded polling dates or ranges, with general and Māori polling stages kept separate. Historical enrolment and turnout use the denominators stated by their original sources.
• 1853–1887: House sizes; affiliations unclassified.
• 1890–1993: historical seat totals and source classifications.
• 1996: national totals for all 21 parties, 65 electorate party-vote tables, 670 party-list entries and all recorded elected candidates. All 65 candidate tables have been transcribed and reconciled against independent official totals.
• 1999–2023: national party totals, all 631 electorate candidate tables and party-vote breakdowns, and official party lists. Electorate party votes reconcile to the national totals for every year.
• MMP elections listed above: recorded electorate tables, electorate candidacies and party-list entries. Availability varies by election and does not establish a complete historic candidate archive.
• 2023: general-election tables include the cancelled Port Waikato candidate poll. The later by-election result and coalition formation announcement are recorded separately in the timeline.
• 2017, 2020, 2023 and 2026: 121 source-backed summaries across housing, health, education, economy and environment. The table below shows the exact coverage.
• Public offices: 496 dated terms from the head-of-government chronology and individual MP profiles; 2322 separately recorded historical-roll terms; and 291 directory year summaries. The collections overlap and are not counts of unique people or unique periods of service. Directory spans are not treated as uninterrupted service. Browse the public-office archive
• Party history: 13 source-backed party overviews with dated milestones, included in this dataset version.
• 2026: a scheduled election, without invented results or projected seats.

What is still to come

All 696 MMP electorate result tables are held. Earlier historical candidates, additional public-office and affiliation intervals, continuous parliamentary composition and full policy programmes require additional source review. Local elections and a complete legislative archive remain later expansions of the original plan.

7 recorded candidacies are awaiting party-affiliation verification; 125 affiliations use individually linked secondary sources. Candidate names and vote totals come from official results. Ballot names from different elections remain separate until their identity links are reviewed. Candidacy counts are not counts of unique people.

The 1999 list archive includes 760 entries across 22 parties. Two missing HTML line breaks were restored and every listed electorate outcome was checked against the separate candidate results. The 53 list allocations reconcile to national totals. All 65 original 1996 candidate tables have been checked against independent official controls; the 670 party-list entries reconcile to 55 list seats. Northland's conflicting printed majority is explained alongside the original vote totals. A missing entry does not imply that an event did not happen or that a party had no policy.

Exact source gaps in this batch

All 2352 rows in Parliament’s 103-page historical roll have been examined: 2322 are admitted as dated terms and 30 are withheld because their dates are missing, invalid or conflict with established chronology. Corrections backed by separate evidence appear alongside both sources. The document’s cover update date is stale, so an open term is not evidence of current membership.

Dataset 2026-09-16-232a8121721f · 1530 source records
Dataset generated: 16 September 2026. Read the source and evidence limitations alongside each record.