It's time for another general election. The fourth general election will be held on Saturday 2 October 2021.

Timeline

The timeline for the election is as follows:

24 September 2021: Nominations open

26 September 2021, 11:59 pm: Nominations close

28 September, 00:00 am: Campaigning begins

1 October 2021, 11:59 pm: Campaigning ends

2 October 2021: 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.

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.

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 28th September, only campaign posts made from that point on will impact a party's final result. Which is to say, press posts and ~~debates~~ after that time will not count.

Edit: if you post in the adjournment debate at any time before campaigning closes, you will get mods from that which will count towards the election.

Post Limits

List-only and electorate-only candidates may make a total of four posts during the campaign. Candidates standing for both the list and electorate may make a total of six 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.

You may make your posts at any point during the campaign.

Post Titles

The titles of campaign posts should start with

#GE4

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

#GE4 [Northland] FTMP gives an interesting lecture about drainage basins on the North Shore

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

#GE4 [List] Aya rants about city dwellers at a farmers market in Ashburton

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.

Electorates

The electorate boundaries are unchanged from the previous election. There are 9 electorates

Northland

Auckland Central

Manukau

Bay of Plenty

Te Puku O Te Whenua

Wellington

Aoraki

Canterbury

Rohe

The boundaries for the electorates may be found on this Google Map. As you have this resource available to you, penalties will apply for campaigning in the wrong electorate. Obviously you are allowed to do list campaigning everywhere, but if you want to win votes in your electorate, you need to campaign in the right place.