So after an intensely frus­trat­ing day for loc­al polit­ics anor­aks, as every oth­er city got to find out who its may­or was going to be, the pre­lim­in­ary Wel­ling­ton res­ults have been announced, and we have…

…no win­ner?

With all the oth­er can­did­ates knocked out and their pref­er­ences redis­trib­uted (this might be a good time to brush up on how STV works if you’ve for­got­ten) Kerry Pren­der­gast is ahead of Celia Wade-Brown, 24,468 votes to 24,428.

Yes, that’s a 40-vote gap. And what’s more—all the votes haven’t actu­ally been coun­ted yet. Say what?

Update: The pre­lim­in­ary res­ults are now up on elections2010.co.nz and the City Coun­cil web­site. And we’ve added a roundup of the coun­cil res­ults down the bot­tom.

What are the uncoun­ted votes?

There appear to be about 900 spe­cial votes still to be coun­ted. We don’t have an exact num­ber. Because the third-placed can­did­ate, Jack Yan, is far behind the top two, all that mat­ters is wheth­er the spe­cial voters ranked Kerry or Celia high­er.

Addi­tion­ally, votes that are post­marked today will be coun­ted when they arrive. Nobody knows how many of these there are.

So who’s going to win?

Celia needs to get slightly more than half of the uncoun­ted votes (about 55%, or 491, if there are 900 of them) to win. Oth­er­wise, Kerry wins. Con­ven­tion­al wis­dom says spe­cial votes usu­ally favour ‘the left’. We’re send­ing a min­ion to research how the spe­cial votes broke in the last couple of elec­tions and will post about that when we know.

When will we find out who won?

The only media cov­er­age we’ve seen of this is a tweet from @NZStuff say­ing the elec­tion “may not be decided until Wed­nes­day”.

Update: The Dom Post is now report­ing that spe­cial vote count­ing will begin on Monday.

But the City Coun­cil Twit­ter feed said Kerry had been re-elec­ted!

Yes, and that’s very naughty of them. (Addendum: see this com­ment thread.)

How many people voted?

Accord­ing to the Coun­cil web­site, 44,465 people had voted as of Thursday, about 33% turnout. That’s not count­ing how­ever many more votes turned up on Fri­day and Sat­urday, but still—shame on the oth­er two-thirds of you.

Update: It appears the last two days of vot­ing brought turnout up to about 40%.

Accord­ing to the pre­lim­in­ary res­ults…

  • East­ern Ward: Leonie Gill and Ray Ahipene-Mer­cer have been re-elec­ted. Simon “Swampy” Marsh has knocked off Rob Goulden.
  • Lamb­ton Ward: Ian McKin­non and Iona Pan­nett have been re-elec­ted. Stephanie Cook appears to have been re-elec­ted as well, but she did­n’t make it past Mar­cus Gan­ley until every­one else was elim­in­ated, and if there are enough spe­cials there’s an out­side chance Gan­ley could sneak past her. Michael Fowl­er, if you’re won­der­ing, came fifth behind Gan­ley.
  • North­ern Ward: Hay­ley Wain is out, pushed into fifth place behind Gareth no-not-that-one Mor­gan and new­comer Justin Lester, who topped the poll. Helene Ritch­ie and Ngaire Best have been re-elec­ted.
  • Onslow-West­ern Ward: Andy Foster, Jo Cough­lan, and John Mor­ris­on have all been re-elec­ted.
  • South­ern Ward: Bry­an Pepper­ell has been re-elec­ted. Paul Eagle has taken Celia Wade-Brown’s vacated seat.