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1899 New Zealand general election

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 16, 2026
Entity authorityQ16933278 ↗
Source-derived summary

The 1899 New Zealand general election was held on 6 and 19 December in the European and Māori electorates, respectively, to elect 74 MPs to the 14th session of the New Zealand Parliament. The election was again won by the Liberal Party, and Richard Seddon remained Prime Minister.

1896 electoral redistribution

The last electoral redistribution was undertaken in 1896 for the 1896 election, and the same electorates were used again. 34 seats were located in the North Island, 36 were in the South Island, and the remaining four were Māori electorates. Since the 1890 electoral redistribution, the four main centres had electorates with three seats each.

The election

The 1899 election was held on Wednesday, 6 December in the general electorates, and on Tuesday, 19 December in the Māori electorates to elect a total of 74 MPs to the 14th Parliament. A total number of 373,744 (77.6%) voters turned out to vote. In three electorates there was only one candidate, and they were thus returned unopposed. Two of those were Liberal candidates: Richard Seddon in the Westland electorate, and John McKenzie in the Waihemo electorate. The third was an opposition representative, William Russell, who stood in the Hawke's Bay electorate.

Editorial summary

This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “1899 New Zealand general election” as open-knowledge reference entry. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.

Editorial reviewA concise reference frame for defining the subject, testing terminology and identifying the institution closest to the evidence. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1899, 1896, 1890—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. The account is most persuasive where Zealand, general and election can be independently traced.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as open-knowledge reference entry. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.

Evidence profile

The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16933278. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1899, 1896 and 1890.

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This entry incorporates text from “1899 New Zealand general election” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.