The plain-English rules.

Five Million Voices is a free, non-partisan civic tool. Using it — with or without an account — means you accept these terms. They exist to keep the tool honest and usable for everyone.

What this tool is (and isn't)

We show how Parliament voted on real bills, and let you record how you would vote. Results shown here are indicative public opinion, not an official poll, referendum, or record — and nothing here is legal, financial, or voting advice.
Five Million Voices is independent: not affiliated with the New Zealand Parliament, the Electoral Commission, or any political party, and voting here has no effect on any official electoral process.
Parliamentary data comes from official public sources. We work hard on accuracy, but Parliament's own records are always the authority. If we've got something wrong, we want to know — tell us and we'll fix it.

Your account

One account per person, and the email on it needs to work — it's how you sign in.
You can request deletion any time from Your account. Thirty days later, the account, votes and profile are permanently gone (signing in again within those 30 days cancels the request).
The optional weekly email about new bills can be switched off in one click — from the email itself, or from Your account.

Fair play

Don't manipulate the tallies: no bots, scripts, vote automation, bulk accounts, or attempts to defeat the human-verification checks.
Don't attack the service: no probing, scraping at abusive rates, or attempts to access other people's data. We may suspend or remove accounts that break these rules, and the aggregate tallies may be corrected to remove manipulated votes.

Using our data

The bill records, tallies, breakdowns, maps, charts and other content on Five Million Voices are ours (or our licensors'). You're welcome to read them, link to them, and quote them — with credit to Five Million Voices — for personal, educational, journalistic, or non-commercial research use.
Commercial and political use needs our written permission. You may not use the data or content from this site — including the aggregate results and demographic breakdowns, whether displayed here or extracted, scraped, downloaded, or reconstructed from it — for any commercial purpose, or by or on behalf of a political party, candidate, election campaign, or lobbying or advocacy organisation, without the express written consent of Five Million Voices. This includes reselling or redistributing it, building a paid or fundraising product on it, or using it to profile, target, or canvass voters.
We're open to licensing the data for research and media use. If that's you, get in touch at media@fivemillionvoices.nz and we'll talk.

Koha (donations)

Donations are voluntary contributions to the running costs of a free tool. They are processed by Stripe — we never see your card details — and are non-refundable except where the law requires.
A donation buys no features, no access, and no influence: over the bills we show, the summaries we write, or the tallies we report. That's the point of it being koha.

Intellectual property

Five Million Voices — the name, the mark, the site's design, the plain-English bill summaries, and the software behind it — is created, owned, and operated by Michael Dutton. All rights in the site and its original content are reserved to him.
What we don't claim: the underlying parliamentary record. Bill texts, votes, and Hansard are New Zealand's public record and belong to everyone — our summaries, tallies, presentation, and compilations of that record are what's ours.
The tiers of use are set out under "Using our data" above: free with credit for personal, educational, journalistic, and non-commercial research use; written permission required for commercial or political use; licensing available for research and media.

The deal, legally

The service is provided free and "as is" — no guarantee of availability, and to the extent New Zealand law allows, no liability for loss arising from its use. Nothing in these terms limits rights you have under the Consumer Guarantees Act or other law that can't be excluded.
Privacy is covered separately in our privacy statement — the short version is we never sell data that identifies you, and never show individual votes.
These terms are governed by New Zealand law. If part of them turns out to be unenforceable, the rest still stands. If we change them in a way that matters, we'll say so on the site.
Questions about these terms: feedback@fivemillionvoices.nz.

Plain English is the binding text — there is no separate legalese version.
Last updated 17 August 2026.