WELLINGTON, New Zealand ? New Zealanders voted in national elections Saturday, with popular Prime Minister John Key seeking to propel his center-right party to the country's first outright parliamentary majority in years.
Polling stations closed at 7 p.m. local time (0600 GMT; 1 a.m. EST), with a winner expected to emerge by 10 p.m. (0900 GMT; 4 a.m. EST).
Both Key and his main opponent, Labour Party leader Phil Goff, cast their ballots early in Auckland polling stations. If either man had anything political to say, local media weren't reporting it ? thanks to a ban in New Zealand on election day coverage that might influence voters.
The coverage ban extends to signs and placards, which were all taken down overnight.
If opinion polls hold, Key's National Party would be the first party to secure a majority on its own since the country abolished a winner-take-all voting system and replaced it in 1996 with a proportional one that generally results in a more fractured parliament.
Anything short of a majority, however, and Key will need to find political partners to form a stable government.
What's not in doubt is Key's personal popularity ? despite a scandal in recent days over a recorded conversation. After three years in power, polls show the former currency trader is far more popular than Goff. Key has earned the nickname "Teflon John" for the way that nothing politically damaging seems to stick to him.
"He's a clever strategist and a good manager," said Jennifer Lees-Marshment, a political studies lecturer at the University of Auckland.
She said Key has been adept at knowing when to forge ahead with policies and when to pull back. His common touch was reassuring to people when a deadly earthquake struck Christchurch in February, she said, and enabled him to share in their excitement in October when the country's national All Blacks team won the Rugby World Cup.
Key's campaign has focused primarily on the economy. He's promising to bring the country back into surplus and begin paying down the national debt within three years. Part of his plan to achieve that is to sell minority stakes in four government-owned energy companies and in Air New Zealand.
That's where the center-left Labour party has found its biggest point of difference. Goff is promising not to sell anything and to raise money by other means, including by introducing a capital gains tax and by raising the age at which people get government pensions by two years to 67.
On the campaign trail, however, those issues got crowded out by a mini-scandal known as the teapot tape saga. While he met at tea shop with a political ally, Key reportedly made rude and embarrassing political comments that were captured on a recording device left by a cameraman.
The tape has never been publicly aired, although opponents, who may have been leaked transcripts, claim the prime minister said that elderly supporters of one opposition party were dying out and also disparaged the leadership of another party. Three days before the election, police began serving search warrants on four media outlets, seeking the tape and related material on the grounds that it is illegal to tape a private conversation.
The cameraman says he left the device inadvertently, and besides, the conversation could hardly be considered private given that media were invited there by Key for an earlier photo opportunity.
Lees-Marshment said she thinks voters grew tired of the attention given to the story and may have begun feeling more sympathetic toward Key.
"It became a story about the story," she said. "The voters got put off by it."
The saga certainly didn't seem to do much to boost the campaign of Goff, who was effectively shut out of any coverage for a few days. Labour's lackluster polling, about 28 percent, has pundits speculating Goff will be replaced as leader of the party within days of the election.
But the saga did seem to boost the fortunes of Winston Peters, who leads the small New Zealand First party. Peters grabbed the headlines with pointed criticism of Key over the affair and his poll numbers shot up.
Another winner in the election is likely to be the Green party, which is polling about 12 percent, putting it on target for its best ever showing.
Voters will also decide whether to keep their electoral system, in which parties get a proportion of parliamentary seats based on the proportion of the votes they receive. Some want to return to a winner-takes-all format, although polls indicate most favor sticking with their current system.
(This version corrects EST times of poll closings in paragraph 2. Recorrects GMT times.)
Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/asia/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111126/ap_on_re_as/as_new_zealand_election
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