What this site is, and where the numbers come from

The foundation is a hand-checked research workbook covering every tracked party's published policy positions, candidate announcements and party lists. On top of that, an automated collector runs several times a day, searching public news and party sources, reading the articles it finds, and adding new coverage, speeches and statements to the archive.

Collected items are de-duplicated by web address, tagged with the party or parties they mention, and labelled by type — article, speech, statement or party release. An item that names two or more parties is filed as cross-party rather than attributed to one side.

Individual polls are listed with their pollster, fieldwork dates and published party percentages. Monthly averages on the overview and polls pages are simple averages of the polls in that month, not a weighted model or a forecast.

Electorate-level polling is not shown. Where no published electorate figure exists, we leave it out rather than estimate it.

Party positions are reproduced in the party's own framing and are not fact-checked, ranked or scored here. No party is given more prominence than another: the same fields are shown for each, and ordering follows polling or alphabetical rules rather than editorial preference.

Automated collection can miss items, mislabel a party, or pick up coverage that is later corrected by the publisher. Always check the linked source before relying on an entry, and treat official information from vote.nz and the Electoral Commission as authoritative for dates, enrolment and voting.

Kōwhiringa Ledger uses automated tooling, including artificial intelligence and large-language-model helpers, to find, read and summarise publicly published news, speeches, statements and party releases about the 2026 general election. The same tooling assigns a party or cross-party tag to each collected item based on the names and terms that appear in the text.

AI is used to assist with collection and organisation only. It does not write opinion, endorse candidates or parties, or generate polling figures — every poll number shown is copied from a named pollster's published result. Headlines and summaries are drawn from the original source and are not independently fact-checked here; where a summary is condensed automatically, the full source link is always shown so you can read the original in full.

Because automated classification can be wrong, each story can be flagged by readers as incorrectly assigned to a party, and every flagged item is reviewed before the assignment is changed. Items that are unclear, off-topic or not genuine news articles are held on a moderation queue rather than published automatically. If an item looks misplaced, please use the “Report wrong party” link on the article, or contact us.