NZ Election 2026 — Compare the Parties

Live: https://nz-election-2026-compare.vercel.app

A comparison of the 7 main parties contesting the 2026 New Zealand general election across 27 policy domains — each policy explained simply (ELI15 analogies), plus a bot-updated live news feed, real published opinion polls with a trend chart, campaign social-media moments decoded, a personalised "Find Your Match" tool, an anonymous leaning poll, and an electorate candidate lookup.

Editorial design system (Fraunces/Inter type, warm sunset-orange accent) over a real NZ landscape photo and real leader photos/party logos — all properly licensed, see Photo & logo credits below.

Pure HTML/CSS/JS on the frontend — no framework, no build step. The only "backend" is a GitHub Action (content bot) and two small Vercel serverless functions (poll + storage).

Structure

index.html                             Main comparison page (includes embedded Find Your Match)
find-your-match.html                   Standalone deep-link version of the same tool
constituency.html                      Electorate candidate lookup page
css/styles.css                         All styling (editorial theme, responsive)
js/data.js                             Parties, 27 domains, policies+analogies, leaders, profiles
js/app.js                              Renders the matrix, polls, decoder, manifesto watch, leaning poll, form
js/match.js                            Renders the Find Your Match profile/concern picker (used on both pages)
js/constituency.js                     Renders the electorate lookup page + interactive map
api/poll.js                            Vercel serverless function: anonymous poll (GET/POST)
api/feedback.js                        Vercel serverless function: suggestion form storage (POST/GET)
data/electorates.json                  Candidate data for all 64 general + 7 Māori electorates
data/news.json                         Bot-generated — latest filtered election news (RSS)
data/polls.json                        Manually-refreshed real published opinion polls
data/manifesto-watch.json              Bot-generated — per-party change-detection status
data/manifesto-hashes.json             Bot-internal — content hashes used to detect changes
scripts/fetch-updates.mjs              The news/manifesto bot (runs on a schedule)
scripts/make-og-image.py               Regenerates assets/og-image.png if you change the branding
scripts/build-electorate-map.mjs       Builds assets/nz-electorates.svg from Stats NZ boundary data
.github/workflows/update-content.yml   Cron job: runs the bot every 2h, commits changes
assets/hero-photo*.jpg                 Hero background (real photo, see credits)
assets/leaders/*.jpg                   Leader photos (real photos, see credits)
assets/logos/*                         Party logos (official party assets)
assets/nz-electorates.svg              Interactive electorate map (built, see below)
assets/favicon.svg, og-image.png       Tab icon + social preview
robots.txt / sitemap.xml               SEO
netlify.toml / vercel.json             Deploy configs (+ security headers)
package.json                           @vercel/blob dependency + local preview script

Run locally

npm install
npm start

or just open index.html in a browser (the poll and some live-data fetches won't work without a real deploy, since they need /api and the GitHub Action's output).

Deploy

Vercel (what's live right now — needed for the poll + SEO canonical URLs)

npm i -g vercel
vercel --prod

Already linked to ravis-projects-053aad42/nz-election-2026-compare. vercel.json handles routing/headers; the /api/poll.js function and the connected Blob store (nz-election-votes) are what make the poll work with zero extra signup — both live under the same Vercel account already used to deploy.

Netlify / GitHub Pages (static parts only)

Everything except the /api/poll and /api/feedback endpoints works fine as a plain static deploy (drag-and-drop to Netlify, or GitHub Pages). The poll will show "unavailable in this deployment" there, since those hosts don't run Vercel's serverless functions — the rest of the site (comparison matrix, news, manifesto watch, electorate lookup) is unaffected.

One-time setup steps (each is free, no new account beyond what you already have)

1. Analytics — Vercel Web Analytics. The page already includes the tracking script (<script defer src="/_vercel/insights/script.js"> in index.html). Turn it on with one click: Vercel dashboard → this project → Analytics tab → Enable. Free on the Hobby plan, no separate account, no cookie banner needed.
2. Suggestion form — already live, no setup needed. It POSTs to api/feedback.js, which stores submissions in the same Vercel Blob store as the poll (not email, not a third-party form service). To read submissions back: curl "https://<your-domain>/api/feedback?key=<FEEDBACK_READ_KEY>" — the key is set as an env var on the Vercel project (vercel env ls to confirm it exists; the value itself is stored as a secret, so keep your own copy somewhere safe when you first set it with vercel env add FEEDBACK_READ_KEY production).
3. Poll storage is already live (Vercel Blob store nz-election-votes, created and connected via vercel storage create / vercel storage connect) — nothing further to do.

The anonymous "leaning" poll

api/poll.js is a tiny serverless function: GET returns current vote totals, POST { party } casts/changes a vote. One browser = one vote, enforced with a random id in a cookie (nzc_voter) — no name, email, or IP is stored. Votes live in a single JSON file in Vercel Blob (poll/votes.json), read-modify-written on each vote. This is a casual engagement feature, not a scientific survey, and the UI says so.

Caveats: it's not abuse-proof (clearing cookies lets someone vote again), and read-modify-write isn't atomic (fine at low traffic, could drop a vote under heavy concurrent load). If this ever needs to be rigorous, swap the storage for a proper KV/DB with atomic increments.

Electorate candidate lookup (constituency.html)

All 64 general electorates and all 7 Māori electorates have verified candidate data in data/electorates.json, sourced from Wikipedia's "Candidates in the 2026 New Zealand general election by electorate" page (fetched section-by-section via the MediaWiki API — action=parse&section=N — since the page is too long to fetch in one shot without truncation). Candidate lists can change until nominations close, so treat this as a strong starting point, not the final word — the page links to the official vote.nz lookup throughout.

To refresh: get the section index list from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=parse&page=Candidates_in_the_2026_New_Zealand_general_election_by_electorate&prop=sections&format=json, then fetch each electorate's section individually and update the electorates / maoriElectorates arrays in data/electorates.json.

Interactive map

The electorate map (assets/nz-electorates.svg) is built from Stats NZ's official "General Electorates 2025" boundaries — the actual 64 electorates used for the 2026 election — via their public ArcGIS FeatureServer, simplified with mapshaper (0.7% Visvalingam simplification; full-resolution boundaries are ~11MB, this is ~65KB) and projected to SVG with a small equirectangular projection (scripts/build-electorate-map.mjs — no mapping library needed at that scale). Electorate names in the SVG's data-name attributes match data/electorates.json exactly; constituency.js keeps the map and the dropdown in sync in both directions.

To rebuild the map (e.g. after a boundary change): re-run the ArcGIS query in that script's comment, then node scripts/build-electorate-map.mjs <input.geojson> assets/nz-electorates.svg. Chatham Islands and other outliers are intentionally outside the fixed mainland viewBox and simply don't render — pick them from the dropdown.

The automated content bot (news + manifesto watch)

There is no free, reliable way to pull live tweets from X/Twitter anymore, and scraping it violates its terms of service — so this bot does not attempt that. The site's "Live: X/Twitter search" link is still the right tool for real-time social content. What the bot does automate, from scripts/fetch-updates.mjs (dependency-free Node, fetch + crypto only):

1. News — pulls RSS from RNZ Politics and Beehive.govt.nz, filters to election-relevant keywords, dedupes, writes the top 15 to data/news.json.
2. Manifesto watch — fetches each of the 7 parties' official policy pages, hashes the stripped text, and compares to the previous run's hash (data/manifesto-hashes.json). Flags "changed" with a timestamp in data/manifesto-watch.json — it tracks that something changed, never what, so you always go read the source.

Enabling the schedule on GitHub

1. Push this repo to GitHub (it isn't yet — see below).
2. .github/workflows/update-content.yml runs every 2 hours (cron 0 */2 * * *) automatically once on the default branch.
3. If the bot's commits fail with a permissions error: Settings → Actions → General → Workflow permissions → Read and write.
4. Run it immediately instead of waiting: Actions → Update election content → Run workflow.
5. GitHub disables schedules after 60 days of repo inactivity — just re-enable from the Actions tab if that happens.

Running it manually

node scripts/fetch-updates.mjs

Overwrites the three data/*.json bot files in place.

Changing sources

Edit NEWS_FEEDS, KEYWORDS, and MANIFESTO_SOURCES in scripts/fetch-updates.mjs. Party sites get restructured during campaigns — a "error" status in Manifesto Watch usually means a URL moved. (Watch for look-alike domains: NZ First's real site is nzfirst.nz, not nzfirst.org.nz, which is an unrelated parked domain.)

Content notes

• Policy + "explain simply" content in js/data.js → POLICIES is hand-written and simplified for comparison — not official party positions, not auto-synced. The Manifesto Watch section links to each party's real policy page.
• "Also on the ballot" (OTHER_PARTIES) is cross-checked against the Electoral Commission's official Register of Political Parties and Logos (as at 5 August 2026) — 17 parties total, 7 compared in detail
  • 10 listed with a headline pitch.
• The News section shows the bot's live feed, falling back to the static NEWS_ITEMS snapshot in js/data.js if the fetch fails.
• Not affiliated with the New Zealand Electoral Commission.

SEO

index.html and constituency.html both carry a descriptive <title>/meta description, canonical URL, Open Graph + Twitter Card tags (image at assets/og-image.png, regenerate with python scripts/make-og-image.py if you change the branding), a WebSite JSON-LD block, and a <noscript> fallback summary of the 7 parties for non-JS crawlers. robots.txt and sitemap.xml sit at the project root. If you redeploy to a different domain, update the canonical/OG URLs in both HTML files, robots.txt, and sitemap.xml.

Photo & logo credits

Hero photo (assets/hero-photo*.jpg): Aoraki/Mt Cook sunrise from Mueller Hut, by Michal Klajban, CC BY-SA 4.0 — cropped/resized, credited in the hero itself.

Leader photos (assets/leaders/*.jpg), all from Wikimedia Commons, cropped to square:

• Luxon, Seymour: Doug Mountain / Governor-General's Office, CC0
• Hipkins: NZ Labour Party, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Davidson, Swarbrick: Green Party of Aotearoa NZ, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Peters: UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, CC BY 2.0
• Ngarewa-Packer, Waititi: Dhantegge & PANG, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Wong: The Opportunity Party, CC BY 4.0

Party logos (assets/logos/*): each party's own official logo, pulled from their current website (or Wikimedia Commons for ACT/Green, both effectively public domain as simple geometric marks), used here for editorial identification only — no endorsement implied. National, NZ First and Te Pāti Māori's logos are white-on-transparent in their official form, so they're composited onto a rounded tile in that party's brand colour for legibility on light backgrounds — if a party changes its logo again, re-fetch the source and recomposite the same way (trim to bounding box, centre on a rounded rect filled with that party's color from js/data.js).

Editing content

Hand-written content (parties, domains, policies, analogies, minor parties) lives in js/data.js. Bot-generated content lives in data/*.json and is overwritten on each bot run. No build step either way — edit and reload.