A database or application program interface (API) which includes information about the votes of the Members of Parliament and party votes in the context of legislation. Formats for this data, in both a database or API situation could be Extensible Markup Language (XML) or JSON (JavaScript Object Notation). In summary, the scopes of the database/API can be: 1. party vote data totals (incl. split party vote) and personal vote data. This will exclude voice vote data. 2. MP data including name and vote (as mentioned in 1.) 3. Legislation data including bills (1st,2nd,3rd reading, amendments, other motions). Data can include summaries, member responsible for bill, vote result (Declaration of result) and details of legislation More detail: The votes included in the API or Database could include bills (including amendment bills, first/second/third readings and whole house committee), other motions, amendments and the adoption of reports. All votes can be represented by yes/no/abstain. Party vote data could displate the party which voted for the legislation, including the members of the party. Split party vote data could display each member of a party and how they voted. Personal (individual/conconscience) votes can display the vote of each member.

Information on the voting record of Members of Parliaments should be as easily accessible by the general public, since they are elected to represent their constituents. This is because the accessibility of information promotes the general public's engagement in the democratic process, promotes transparency and allows constituents to be informed of the voting record of their MPs.

Opening this data would solve this problem because it will increase the accessibility of the data. Currently, the only offical ways to get this data is through the Hansard Reports: https://www.parliament.nz/en/pb/hansard-debates/rhr/search?Criteria.page=HansardReports&Criteria.ParliamentNumber=-1&Criteria.Dt=Hansard%20-%20vote&Criteria.PageNumber=1.
However the limitations of this are that each vote is in a separate link, which totals to 11059 links currently. The problem with this is that it is not easy to search through the voting data to find specific data based on your desired criteria (i.e., title of bill, members who voted), unless you search manually through the Hansard reports. The issue with searching manually is that it restricts other forms of more efficient data collection, such as a researcher, application or website being able to track voting records.
Therefore a database or an api can centralise all the voting information, make the data more accessible to the general public and provide data for researchers and applications which can compile voting data and make it more accessible to the general public.