March 2026

From the archives – the South Australian Ticket Vote Savings Provision

One of the most muddled aspects of the recent South Australian election was reference to lower house ticket votes.

I’d started to write a post on the subject referring to an Electoral Backgrounder published by the Electoral Commission of South Australia (ECSA) in 2020. The backgrounder explains how the system works, provides background statistics on its use, and summarises the arguments for and against the provision. It’s difficult to link to the backgrounder so I’ve made it available on my site here.

The backgrounder references an article I published on the subject as part of the ABC’s 2006 South Australian election site. I barely remember it and the old election sites are no longer available. But digging around on the ABC’s old content server, I found the original article.

I intend to cover the subject in more detail tomorrow with statistics on how many votes are saved by the ticket voting system. But until then, I’m re-publishing my article from 2006. I’ve added a few notes in the text where the rules have been changed since 2006.
Read More »From the archives – the South Australian Ticket Vote Savings Provision

SA2026 – Finniss – Will a candidate win from fourth place?

UPDATE: As outlined inside the post, the distribution of preferences today confirmed that Finniss was won by Independent Lou Nicholson from fourth place. To steal a pun from someone responding to me on X, the result brings new meaning to “crossing the Finniss line”.

The post starts with my comments on the count before it was complete. After that I outline how the full distribution unfolded when the detail was released.
Read More »SA2026 – Finniss – Will a candidate win from fourth place?

2026 Federal Redistributions – South Australia

Proposed new electoral boundaries for South Australia have been released. It is a bad day for me to try and analyse them as I have other commitments. But I have done a quick summary of the changes in this post.

The number of seats is unchanged at 10 on and at first glance the boundary changes are minor.

There is one change of electorate name. As the Redistribution Committee describes it –

The Redistribution Committee proposes renaming the electorate of Grey to the electorate of O’Donoghue. This is to honour the legacy of Dr Lowitja O’Donoghue AC CBE DSG (1932–2024), a Yankunytjatjara woman who was the first Indigenous nurse at the Royal Adelaide Hospital, and became a distinguished public administrator, champion for health equity, and Indigenous rights activist. The electorate of Grey was chosen to be renamed due to Dr O’Donoghue’s strong connection to the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands, which are largely located in the electorate of Grey.

More inside the post.
Read More »2026 Federal Redistributions – South Australia

SA2026 – South Australia Election Result Summary (rolling updates)

Count complete – Updated 5:00pm AEST Thursday 2 April March 2026.

Quick Summary – All deats declared. Labor has 34 seats, the Liberal Party 5, One Nation 4, Independents 4.

Who will be the Opposition Leader? With the Liberal Party winning a fifth seat it is clear Liberal Leader Ashton Hurn will retain the parliamentary position of Leader of the Opposition. But what if the Liberals had finished with the same number of seats as One Nation? Emeritus Professor Anne Twomey has produced a video on her Constitution Clarion YouTube site running through the known conventions on the subject.

Update on 2PP: I understand the Electoral Commission has chosen not to do alternate 2PP counts in every seat. That’s a sensible decision with only 13 Labor-Liberal finishes against 26 Labor-One Nation contests and one Labor-Independent finish. I understand the other seven contests where Labor is excluded will have an additional two-party preferred count done. So the state-wide after preferences count for the 2026 South Australian election will produce a state-wide contest between Labor and everyone else.

Notes on Preferences

So far preference distributions from around two-thirds of seats have been released. (Thursday – some final figures released today are yet to be added.) Looking at the point where only three candidates remain in the count, the preference flows we are seeing are –

  • In 6 Labor-Liberal contests where One Nation candidates were the last excluded, preferences are splitting 31% to Labor, 69% to Liberal
  • In 7 Labor-One Nation contests where Liberal candidates were the last excluded, preferences are splitting 32% Labor 68% One Nation.
  • In 5 Labor Liberal contests where Green candidates were the last excluded, preferences are flowing 85% to Labor, 15% to Liberal.
  • In 10 Labor-One Nation contests where Green candidates were the last excluded, preferences are flowing 81% to Labor, 19% to One Nation.
  • The only count so far available where Labor was the last excluded is Chaffey where Labor’s preferences split 71% to Liberal 29% to One Nation.
  • These statistics do not measure preference flows. They are from the distribution of preferences so all flows include preferences from other candidates excluded earlier in the count.

Read More »SA2026 – South Australia Election Result Summary (rolling updates)

SA2026 – Some Early Observations on the Result

(UPDATE: I’ve started doing rolling updates of the overall figures that you can find in this post. For more details figures on each seat and regular updates my suggestion is use the ABC election site which will update results every time the Electoral Commission produces new data. I’m doing work on the site weeding out inconsistencies in the Electoral Commission’s data.)

The scale of the Liberal Party’s disastrous result at Saturday’s South Australian election is hard to comprehend for anyone with a background in Australian political history.

Australia has had a stable dominant two party system for eight decades since the formation of the Liberal Party in the 1940s. On one side of politics is the Labor Party, on the other the Liberal-National Coalition in Canberra, or the Liberal Party on its own in South Australia.

For one of Australia’s two major parties, the South Australian Liberal Party, to perform so badly is a political earthquake. The Liberal Party has been beaten into third place with just 19.0% of the first preference vote. (As of Monday afternoon with 65.0% of the first preference vote counted.)

The eight decade old Liberal Party has been outpolled by Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, a party that has only twice reached double figures at a state election, both of those occurring in its home state Queensland.

In this post I’m going to run through some of the more startling statistics of the election. Most are good news for One Nation and bad news for the Liberal Party. The numbers also include warnings for the Labor Party.
Read More »SA2026 – Some Early Observations on the Result

Updates on the South Australian Election Result

(UPDATE: This was written on Sunday to try and explain how the count would unfold after election night. After a few days rest and recovery, I’ve started another post with rolling updates of the result which I will update at least once each day. For more regular updates I suggest you use the ABC election site which will update results every time the Electoral Commission produces new data. I’m doing work on the site weeding out inconsistencies in the Electoral Commission’s data.)

I’ve been in Adelaide this week working for the ABC on the state election coverage. I may have retired from on camera work, but I’m still involved in analysis off camera.

And last night was one of the most challenging coverages I’ve worked on. I estimate that half of the state’s 47 electorates had a choice of preferences that did not reflect the primary results that arrived on election night. One Nation finished in the top two in around half of the state’s seats. This was very many more seats than the Electoral Commission had prepared for.

That’s not a criticism of the Electoral Commission. It must nominate a pairing of candidate before the count is known, and is guided by history as much if not more than by opinion polls.

But that’s all about last night. Let me describe how the count will unfold from here.
Read More »Updates on the South Australian Election Result

2026 South Australian Election Coverage

This is my usual blog message for the night of an election. Google sends thousands of people to this page on election night even though I am not providing any on-line coverage. If I get a chance I may write something later this evening.

While I have retired from appearing on television, I am still involved in covering elections. I am in Adelaide tonight assisting the ABC coverage in an off-camera roll.

If you want to follow the election tonight, I suggest you watch the ABC, the main channel in South Australia or ABC News 24 in the rest of the country. Live from 6pm central time, 6:30 eastern states. There will also be live results at the ABC elections page.

Read More »2026 South Australian Election Coverage

2026 South Australian Election Preview

The Labor Party is set for a landslide victory at this weekend’s South Australian election. Yet despite its forgone result, the election is set to dominate national political debate in its aftermath. Not because of who will win, but rather over who will finish second.

The Labor government of Peter Malinauskas was first elected in 2022, winning a sweeping victory that added Steven Marshall to the list of his state’s one term Liberal Premiers.

Since coming to office, Malinauskas has dominated opinion polls and his Liberal opponents. Steven Marshall retired the leadership after the 2022 election. David Spiers and Vincent Tarzia have come and gone. Now it is Ashton Hurn, just 35, female and a first term MP, who has been left with under than 100 days to restore her party’s fortunes.

Hurn has taken over a Liberal opposition that has trailed Labor in the polls for four years. Labor has gained the seats of Hurn’s predecessors Steven Marshall and David Spiers at by-elections. It is less than a year since the Federal election when Labor swept every seat in metropolitan Adelaide.

And the federal situation has worsened since. Nationally the Coalition is stalked by the spectre of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation. Hanson’s party has undergone a massive revival as cost-of-living pressure has grown and the Coalition has descended into fratricide and internal division.

National polling has shown One Nation matching and even outpolling the Coalition. As the first quarter of 2026 has passed, even federal Labor’s primary vote has begun to slip with the rise One Nation.

South Australian polls have not shown a similar decline in Labor support, but they have replicated the shift from the Liberal Party to One Nation. With final polls agreeing that One Nation is now polling second, the question is – who will finish second on election day?

To date all we have is opinion polls. Are the polls measuring disenchantment or voting intention? Saturday’s South Australian election may finally tell us whether One Nation’s rise is real.

So dominant is state Labor that perhaps the election is not a true test of the national mood. But it is a measure of whether the polls are right.

If One Nation finishes second in the vote, and Liberal support follows the polls and drops below 20%, then the feverish spiral of recent Coalition politics may worsen.

Are voters going to turn out and vote for One Nation in numbers not seen since One Nation’s first electoral test at the 1998 Queensland election? And will this turn into seats?

Labor is expected to dominate Adelaide, but will we see One Nation poll strongly in the city’s north where Labor’s safest seats lie. Thirty three of the state’s 47 seats are in the metropolitan area. For One Nation to poll above 20% state-wide, it must poll strongly in Adelaide even if the result sees more second places than seat wins.

The collapse in Liberal support will see the party lose further seats to Labor with another metropolitan wipe-out possible. The One Nation threat will be greatest in rural seats where the Liberal Party is already challenged by Independents. Will One Nation further damage Liberal prospects?

And if One Nation matches its polling numbers, can its vote be turned into seats?Read More »2026 South Australian Election Preview

SA2026 – Tracking the Early Vote

Update: – Friday 20 March at the end of the early voting period.

In 2026 South Australia joins the rest of Australia in removing restrictions on in-person early voting. The rule that required the Electoral Commission to encourage polling day voting has been abolished, and early votes are now cast as “ordinary” votes, the voter marked off the roll and the ballot paper placed directly into a ballot box.

Previously early votes were placed in declaration envelopes that needed to be checked against the roll before opening. That could only be done in the week after election day, preventing the counting of early votes on election night.

Almost as importantly for knowing the result on election night in 2026, South Australia will join the rest of the nation in allowing early votes to be counted and reported on election night.

Given the huge surge in early voting at the 2026 election, there is likely to be a gap between the reporting of polling place results, and the reporting of the much larger EVC counts later in the evening.

The number of early voting centres (EVCs) have been increased from 22 in 2018 to 37 in 2022 and 59 in 2026. This year there are EVCs in all 47 districts plus a second EVC in each of Adelaide, Chaffey, Flinders, Giles, Hartley, MacKillop, Mawson, Narungga, Ngadjuri, Schubert, Stuart and Wright.

And the numbers reported so far show a huge increase in early voting in 2026.

  • By the end of early voting on Friday 20 19 March, there had been 466,364 early votes cast compared to a final tally of 212,466 in 2022. 35.4% of enrolled voters have already voted at EVCs with one day of early voting to come, compared to a final tally of 16.8% in 2022. There were 93,016 pre-polls issued today. (There is a discrepancy of about 11,000 votes in my calculations from the table of early votes in the Electoral Commission website compared to the Commission’s total.)
  • Applications for postal votes have closed. 174,121 have been received, 13.2% of enrolled voters. In 2022 there were a total of 171,687 applications representing 13.6% of enrolment which is a small decline in postal voting.

  • There are graphs and more information on early and postal voting in 2022 inside the post.
    Read More »SA2026 – Tracking the Early Vote

NSW2027 – Parties Registered to Contest the 2027 Election

The next NSW election will be held on Saturday 13 March 2027. The date has been brought forward by two weeks from the fixed term date specified in the Constitution to avoid a clash with Easter.

Under NSW Electoral Law, a party must be registered 12 months in advance of an election to have party names printed on ballot papers and to use central nomination of candidates. This registration date has been passed and there are 20 parties registered to contest the election.

Rather than list them in alphabetic order, I’ll list them in descending order of me knowing them from previous elections.
Read More »NSW2027 – Parties Registered to Contest the 2027 Election