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.