It's finally time for the general election. The first general election will be held on Saturday 27 January 2024.

Timeline

The timeline for the election is as follows:

13 January 2024: Nominations open

17 January 2024: Nominations close

18 January 2024, 00:00 am: Campaigning begins

25 January 2024, 11:59 pm: Campaigning ends

27 January 2024: Polling day

TBD: Results

Candidate Submission

Candidates may stand on behalf of a party by being nominated by their leader, or may stand as independents by nominating themselves. Candidates nominated after the deadline may receive electoral penalties, and acceptance of the nomination is at the sole discretion of the Electoral Commission. No nominations will be accepted after campaigning begins. Candidate submission will be via a google form, which will provided when candidate submission opens.

Electorates

This election, we will be going back to having a smaller Parliament. We will have 5 electorates and 4 list seats. They shall be Rohe, the country-wide Māori seat, Te Waipounamu, covering all of South Island, and 3 electorates for North Island. They shall be Northland, Waikato, and Manawatū, A map can be found here.

Campaigning

All campaigning will take place on the r/ModelNZCampaigning subreddit. Posts outside of that subreddit will not count towards the calculation of the final score. Not even a little bit.

Campaign posts are separated into two categories, electorate posts and list posts. Electorate posts boost a candidate's vote share in the electorate the post is made, and list posts boost a candidate's party's vote share nationally on the party list.

List-only and electorate-only candidates may make a total of three posts during the campaign. Candidates standing for both the list and electorate may make a total of five posts during the campaign, these posts may be used in any combination of list and electorate posts. In addition party leaders may make 2 additional posts.

In addition to the campaign posts, parties may submit a manifesto. This manifesto is not included in the post limit.

There are no per-day limits or requirements. Campaigning will have exactly the same effect regardless of when it is posted during the campaign period.

As a reminder, campaign posts are scored based on both quality and effort. Quality, shorter campaign posts will be scored higher than lower quality, longer campaign posts.

When the campaign begins on the 18th January, only campaign posts made from that point on will impact a party's final result. Which is to say, press posts after that time will not count.

Post Titles

The titles of campaign posts should start with

#GE1

If you're making an electorate post, you need to include the name of the electorate, for example:

#GE1 [Te Waipounamu] Aya rants about city dwellers at a farmers market in Ashburton

If you're making a list post, you need to mark it as such, for example:

#GE1 [List] Aya calls for a boycott of any company which does business in Auckland

If you don't tag your posts properly, it will still be counted, it's mostly for searching later. But you'll make us sad, and that may affect your mods.