Methodology and sources
How the Newswire 2026 voting tool works, every question, and where each party position comes from.
How the tool works
The tool asks 30 questions on policy proposals where the seven parliamentary parties (plus TOP) take meaningfully different positions. For each question you choose one of five answers (from strongly disagree to strongly agree) and can flag the issue as one that matters to you.
Your answers are compared to each party’s stated 2026 position on the same question. Where you and a party agree, the party scores points. Where you disagree, points are subtracted. Issues you flagged as important count double.
Each party’s score is then expressed as a percentage of the maximum it could have scored from your answers. The party with the highest match is shown as your closest fit. If two parties are within two percentage points of each other, both are shown as a tie.
What the tool is not
It is not a prediction of the election result, an endorsement of any party, or a substitute for reading the parties’ platforms. It compares stated policy positions against your answers, and that is all. Voting decisions are usually made on more than policy — character, candidates, electorate considerations and trust in delivery all matter.
Question selection
Questions cover ten policy domains: tax and spending; climate and energy; te Tiriti and Māori policy; housing; health; education; law and order; immigration; foreign policy and defence; social policy and welfare. The number of questions per domain reflects roughly how much of the 2026 campaign debate has been spent on each area.
Each question is a concrete policy proposal where parties have publicly taken different positions — not an abstract value statement. Where possible the question references a specific bill, policy document or coalition-agreement clause so a sceptical reader can audit the link between the question and a party’s actual conduct.
To reduce acquiescence bias (the tendency of survey respondents to agree more often than disagree), the wording of about half the questions is framed in support of the status-quo or right-of-centre position, and the other half in support of a change or left-of-centre position. So saying “agree” to every question would not produce a left-leaning result.
Scoring
Each answer maps to a value on a five-point scale: strongly disagree −2, disagree −1, neutral 0, agree +1, strongly agree +2. Each party’s stated position is encoded on the same scale.
For every question you answer, we compute the distance between your value and the party’s value. The maximum possible distance is 4 (e.g. you strongly agree, the party strongly disagrees). Per-question match against a party is then (4 − distance) / 4, which sits between 0 and 1.
Each party’s overall match percentage is the importance-weighted average of those per-question matches across the questions you answered. Issues you flagged as important count double; skipped questions are ignored entirely.
So 100% means identical answers on every question, 50% means as much agreement as disagreement on average, and 0% means exactly opposite on every weighted question. The result is shown as a tie when the top two parties are within two percentage points of each other.
Data freshness and fact-checks
Each party’s position is sourced to a public document — manifesto, bill, coalition agreement, or attributable public statement by a senior figure. Positions are reviewed before the tool launches and again in early September 2026, after the parties have released their 2026 election manifestos. Last verified: ….
If a party position changes substantively between fact-checks and we have not yet updated the tool, the result for users in that period will be off by one or two questions on that party. Corrections to: hello@newswire.co.nz.
The 30 questions
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