The 1935 Wellington City mayoral election was part of the New Zealand local elections held that same year. In 1935, elections were held for the

Mayor of Wellington The Mayor of Wellington is the head of the municipal government of the City of Wellington. The mayor presides over the Wellington City Council. The mayor is directly elected using the Single Transferable Vote method of proportional representati ...

plus other local government positions including fifteen city councillors. The polling was conducted using the standard

first-past-the-post In a first-past-the-post electoral system (FPTP or FPP), formally called single-member plurality voting (SMP) when used in single-member districts or informally choose-one voting in contrast to ranked voting, or score voting, voters cast their ...

electoral method.

Background

Incumbent mayor Thomas Hislop stood for a third-term, the first mayor to do so since Sir John Luke in

1915 Events Below, the events of World War I have the "WWI" prefix. January * January – British physicist Sir Joseph Larmor publishes his observations on "The Influence of Local Atmospheric Cooling on Astronomical Refraction". *January 1 ...

. His opponent was

Bob Semple Robert Semple (21 October 1873 – 31 January 1955) was a union leader and later Minister of Public Works for the first Labour Government of New Zealand. He is also known for creating the Bob Semple tank. Early life He was born in Sofala, New ...

, a Labour councillor and MP for . During the campaign, Semple received slanderous allegations of being an

Atheist Atheism, in the broadest sense, is an absence of belief in the existence of deities. Less broadly, atheism is a rejection of the belief that any deities exist. In an even narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there no ...

, which he denied stating "If the people of the world followed the philosophy of

Jesus Jesus, likely from he, יֵשׁוּעַ, translit=Yēšūaʿ, label=Hebrew/Aramaic ( AD 30 or 33), also referred to as Jesus Christ or Jesus of Nazareth (among other names and titles), was a first-century Jewish preacher and religious ...

there would be no poverty...". For the second election in a row, Labour won a majority of the vote, but could not win a majority of seats. However, Labour did win one more seat than in 1933 and then went on to win a

by-election A by-election, also known as a special election in the United States and the Philippines, a bye-election in Ireland, a bypoll in India, or a Zimni election (Urdu: ضمنی انتخاب, supplementary election) in Pakistan, is an election used to f ...

soon after increase their representation further.

Mayoralty results

Councillor results

Table footnotes:

Notes

References

* Mayoral elections in Wellington 1935 elections in New Zealand Politics of the Wellington Region 1930s in Wellington {{NewZealand-election-stub