After three years of being forced to go about our regular lives, the election is finally here. And boy, what a start. Yes, you all know what we’re talking about: Bill English reminiscing about his English literature degree in Wellington tonight was a real hit with the voters. Is that where he got his last name? You have to wonder.

Tonight, The Civilian kicks into election gear with our Election Special, which is really just like the regular Civilian but with lots of election articles all the time that make you never want to hear about politics ever again.

We call it The Civilian Election Special: How Will You Vote Will You Vote At All Will You Even Consider Voting for Gareth You Probably Shouldn’t – Part One.

Or Part 1. Some people like to write numbers, some people don’t. Where do you stand? Where do the parties stand?

But don’t worry, we’ll tell you all that and more. You don’t even need to think. Unlike other news organisations, our coverage won’t beat around the bush and ask you to do the hard work of deciding how you feel about something.

In this modern age of technology, why use valuable brain power to decide how to vote, when a series of poorly photoshopped news graphics can do it for you?

That’s why we’d like to introduce our state of the art election tracker, which we’ll be updating at least five times a week throughout the campaign.

We should note that we made all of this in advance and at this point we simply don’t have the time or money to remove Andrew Little from any of our graphics, so we’re just going to go ahead and run with it.

HOW DO I READ THIS TRACKER?

As you’ll see down each side of the tracker is a box for each Parliamentary party and their leader. There are only six boxes, but seven parties in Parliament, so Peter Dunne and Te Ururoa Flavell are presently engaged in a brutal battle over the last box. We’ll keep you updated on who’s winning.

In fairness, David Seymour probably shouldn’t have his own box but we were unable to remove him after he aggressively asserted his property rights.

Underneath each party leader is a campaign performance star rating that reflects the current state of each party’s campaign.

In the middle of the graphic is an assortment of items that each of our party leaders will be attempting to collect the closer we get to election day. We’ll be allocating these each time we update the tracker, and if a leader acquires an item, it will be moved into their box. The Civilian is predicting that the party leader who acquires the most items will become Prime Minister.

These items include: the one ring of power, the west coast of Australia, a dictaphone, a Nissan Cube, the Whitcoulls Santa, a Cigna Funeral Plan, Don Brash’s glasses, Brian from Te Kuiti, a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black, Riche McCaw’s thighs, Stewart Island, Uncle Ben’s Special Fried Rice, a Guatemalan worry doll, the charred corpse of a sparrow, a rotten feijoa, Bob Parker’s parka, a bowtie, a box set of Coronation Street DVDs, a Kiwiburger, and Thingee’s missing eyeball.

Different party leaders will likely be seeking to acquire different items. For example: Winston Peters will be going after that Cigna Funeral Plan, while Andrew Little will definitely want a bottle of Johnnie Walker at this point.

Also at the bottom of our graphic we’ll be declaring the winner of the day, and the loser of the day.

Finally, there’s the Gareth Morgan Attention Meter, which reflects the amount of press coverage he’s receiving relative to his need to feel relevant. If that gets too low, things could really get out of control, so keep an eye on it.