How this works

You answer up to 37 statements on a five-point scale and say how much each issue matters. For every statement we hold a position for each of the six parliamentary parties, on the same five-point scale, taken from their published policy. We compare your answer with theirs, weight it by how much you said it mattered, and average across everything you answered. That's your alignment score.

There is no AI, no model and no black box. The same answers always give the same result. Every number can be traced to a specific question and a specific published party position.

Six sectors, at least five questions each, so no topic is left out just because it generated fewer headlines. As parties announce policy during the campaign, questions are added to the sector they belong to, so some sectors now carry more than five. That means sectors are not weighted identically: a sector with seven questions counts for slightly more of your overall score than one with five. The sector breakdown on your results page shows each sector separately.

Statements were chosen to separate the parties. A question everyone agrees on tells you nothing about who to vote for, so questions where all six parties held the same position were cut. Several statements deliberately cut across the usual left-right line: immigration, state ownership of banks and power companies, and the superannuation age all split the blocs in ways that surprise people.

Every position follows three rules:

All 222 positions are published in full, with their sources and verification dates, on the where every party stands page. Each carries its own check date, and they are re-checked as parties release policy before 7 November.

Your answer and the party's position are both numbers from −2 (strongly disagree) to +2 (strongly agree), so the furthest apart you can be is 4. For each question:

agreement = 1 − |your answer − their position| ÷ 4

Each question is then multiplied by its weight, and the whole thing is averaged:

raw = Σ(agreement × weight) ÷ Σ(weight)

One more step matters, and it is the difference between a fair result and a rigged one. Parties do not all have the same range available to them. A party that takes firm positions can score 0 against someone who disagrees with all of them. A party whose positions are mixed or undeclared cannot, because “no position” is never far from any answer: on this bank Labour's lowest possible score was 22% while ACT's was 2%. So each party is stretched across the range it can actually occupy:

alignment = (raw − floor) ÷ (1 − floor) × 100

Floor is the score that party would get from someone who disagreed with it as strongly as the scale allows, calculated from the same questions you answered and the same weights you gave them. Scores are not otherwise massaged to make the winner look decisive, so 50% still means you agreed with that party about as often as you disagreed, and if the top two are within 3 points the result page calls it a tie rather than picking one.

Each question carries a coefficient for two axes: economic (state to market) and social (progressive to traditional). Your position is the weighted sum of your answers against those coefficients, normalised to a −10 to +10 range. Crucially, the party dots go through the identical function, using their own stances at equal weight. No party is hand-placed. Here is where that calculation puts them:

The chart and the percentages answer two different questions, so they can disagree, and when they do the percentage is the one to trust. Your percentage is worked out from every answer, one at a time, weighted by how much you said each issue matters. The chart compresses those same answers into two numbers, which throws away everything that doesn't load onto one of the two axes.

Party dots are fixed, placed from each party's own stances at equal weight, because a party has no view about which issues matter most to you. Your dot moves with your importance ratings.

A quiz like this can be slanted without anyone intending it, just by writing more statements where “agree” happens to be the left-wing or right-wing answer. Balance is measured every time the questions change, and these checks have to pass before anything is published:

This caught a real problem. The first version of the question bank leaned left economically: someone agreeing with everything came out at −3.3 on the economic axis, and 18 of 30 statements favoured the left bloc against 12 for the right. Four statements were rewritten so that agreeing is the right-leaning answer, the same facts framed from the other direction. Since then the bank has moved the other way as campaign policy was added. We publish that number rather than claim a balance the bank does not have.

This is the first question researchers ask, and it needs a straight answer: NZVoteCheck is not a survey. There is no sample and no population estimate. One person answers, and we compare their answers to party policy. That doesn't make the concern wrong; it points at three different things.

In plain terms: if you have a consistent worldview, the result is reliable. If your views genuinely straddle several parties, the percentages will sit close together, and that closeness is the signal.

Scoring by agreement distance structurally favours parties with middling positions. A party with a moderate or undeclared stance is never far from any answer. Almost no tool like this discloses that, so here is what it did to this one and what we did about it.

With no real person involved, every party should come top about as often as any other. Under plain distance scoring Labour came top 58% of the time and ACT 3%, simply because Labour had the least committal set of positions. Rescaling each party across its own range fixed it at the source, without blunting the tool: a voter built from a party's own platform with nine of thirty answers randomised is still matched to that party about 99% of the time.

We changed the maths rather than the questions on purpose. Tilting the question set to compensate would have meant introducing a second bias to cancel the first.

Each question can count half, once or double. The weight multiplies both the agreement and the total, so it shifts the balance between questions rather than inflating any score. Marking everything “a lot” is mathematically identical to marking everything “normal”: weighting only does something when you distinguish between issues.

“Every position is cited” only means something if the citation actually supports the claim. An early version leaned heavily on generic policy index pages, and in several cases that page didn't contain the policy area at all. Positions have since been re-sourced against specific manifesto pages, press releases, reported announcements and the legislative record, and every source is tiered.

Te Pāti Māori is the remaining weak spot: most of its positions rest on its own policy page, because that page is genuinely its main published statement and carries less sector-by-sector detail than other parties' material. We'd rather say that plainly than pad the citation list.

Scoring runs entirely in your browser. Answers are kept on your device so you can come back, and they're encoded into the share link if you choose to share one. There is no account and no login. At the end of the quiz, a sharing box above the “see my results” button is ticked by default. The tool works identically if you untick it.

Because we can't identify your response, we also can't retrieve or delete an individual one on request. That is a deliberate trade: it is the reason the data is safe. Political opinions are sensitive information under the Privacy Act 2020, which is why this is anonymous by construction and disclosed at the moment it happens.

NZVoteCheck is not affiliated with, funded by, or endorsed by any political party, candidate, or lobby group. The site's own colours were picked specifically to avoid every party's brand colours, so the design itself doesn't nudge anyone. More on who built it is on the about page.