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A sign points the way to a voting booth during the Hamilton West by-election.
Photo: RNZ / Anneke Smith
National candidate Tama Potaka has taken an early lead with a third of the votes counted in the Hamilton West by-election.
With 34.3 percent of the vote counted, Potaka has 2977 votes, with Labour’s Georgie Dansey trailing with 2148 votes.
Act Party candidate James McDowall is well behind with 631 votes, while Labour MP Gaurav Sharma, whose resignation triggered the by-election, has 560 votes.
Polling booths opened this morning at 9am, and closed at 7pm.
Sharma, the winning candidate in the 2020 election, captured a 53 percent majority of the 39,034 valid electorate votes. The number of votes in today’s by-election is tracking to be half of those cast in 2020.
Twelve candidates have been vying for the seat, but the by-election has been considered a two-horse race between the two main parties.
The by-election was triggered by the October resignation of Labour MP Gaurav Sharma.
Twenty voting places were operating across the electorate today.
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