April 2026

2026 Nepean by-election (Victoria)

RESULTS: I will be running a results service on election night. Here are the links to the four pages.

Links: Result Summary | Commentary | Swing Tables | Polling Place Results

The ancient Etruscans engaged in a ritual we know today as ‘haruspicy’ where animals were sacrificed and their entrails examined to interpret the will of the gods and divine the future.

A modern political version of haruspicy will unfold this weekend over the results of the by-election in the Victorian state seat of Nepean. The entrails of the result will be examined and dissected as everyone involved tries to decide what the result portends for the Victorian state election in November.

Though with Labor choosing not to contest what is a natural Liberal seat, the Nepean result can’t offer a full guide to how the parties are faring.

The by-election takes place six weeks after Labor’s victory at the South Australian state election, and one week ahead of a similar party contest in the by-election for the Federal seat of Farrer.

There are differences and similarities between Nepean and the other contests.

The difference with South Australia is clear. A first-term SA Labor government led by the hugely popular Peter Malinauskas was expected to and duly won a landslide victory.

That contrasts with the challenge facing an unpopular third-term Victorian Labor government led by Premier Jacinta Allan. Not contesting Nepean avoids any scrutiny on Labor’s electoral performance.

Similarities are with the other side of politics. Like its SA Liberal brethren, the Victorian Liberal Party has achieved victory at only one state election this century. Both branches have suffered from ideological and personal factionalism in recent years and undergone three Leadership changes since the last election. And in late 2025 both state branches moved to make thirty-something females their Leader, Ashton Hurn in South Australia and Jess Wilson in Victoria.

South Australia also saw a surge in support for One Nation at the expense of the Liberal Party. Victorian and federal opinion polls show the same trend of surging support for One Nation. The party is expected to outpoll both the Liberals and Nationals in Farrer.

And like Farrer, Nepean has no Labor candidate, a high profile local Independent, and One Nation’s campaign is boosted by rising support in opinion polls.

The 2025 Federal Election

At last May’s Federal election, the Liberal Party faced a closer than expected race against Independent Ben Smith in the local federal seat of Flinders. Nepean covers the western end of Flinders, and based on the Federal result, Smith could have won a majority after preferences in Nepean. At the by-election, One Nation would be expected to poll more strongly than the 5.2% it attracted last May.

What to Watch for in Nepean

How will Independent Tracee Hutchison poll and will she make the final two after preferences? How much will Hutchison or the Greens benefit from the absence of a Labor candidate?

Will one or both of Liberal Anthony Marsh and One Nation’s Darren Hercus make the final two?

With Hercus and Marsh recommending preferences for each other, what proportion of voters will follow the preference recommendations?Read More »2026 Nepean by-election (Victoria)

SA2026 – it turns out the count ain’t over

Tuesday 21 April: To the acute embarrassment of ECSA, another story broke about “found” ballot papers. In fact the ballot papers were located a week or two ago, after the declaration of the polls but their existence only broke today. These are all absent votes, a small number taken at retirement homes in Newland, and absent votes taken on election day in Enfield polling places. This produced votes for other electorates, none of which were delivered to their home district in time to make the count. Hence ECSA’s press release being in a strange past tense with reference to the small number of ballots not having made it in to the count in other districts. The numbers involved are no more than a handful for any district and the districts involved had large margins.

Update – the votes have been counted and confirmed the victory of One Nation’s Chantelle Thomas. Here’s the text of the release by Acting Electoral Commissioner Leah McLay.

A count of Narungga ballot papers retrieved from the district of Stuart occurred at the Electoral Commission this morning.

The purpose of the count was for the Commission to determine whether the result in Narungga would have differed, had those ballots been included in the initial count and subsequent recount.

There were 81 ballot papers opened in the presence of scrutineers. Of those, 1 was rejected and 4 were deemed informal. Of the 76 votes counted in a two-party preferred count, 46 were for Chantelle Thomas, One Nation and 30 were for Tania Stock, Liberals. Had the ballot papers been included in the original count and subsequent recount, the margin in favour of Chantelle Thomas One Nation would have increased from 58 to 74.

I have therefore determined that the result in Narungga would not have differed had the ballots been included.

More info: An update on the votes. Liberal received 24 votes plus 6 preferences received for 30 votes after preferences. One Nation received 33 votes and 13 preferences for 46 after preferences. The votes were 57 Absent Early Votes and 19 Absent polling day votes.

My original commentary is now inside the post.

Read More »SA2026 – it turns out the count ain’t over

SA2026 – huge win for Labor but a warning in the result

The result of the recent South Australian election was clear with Labor the biggest winner, the Liberal Party the biggest loser, and Pauline Hanson’s One Nation the big improver.

In the aftermath Labor can bask in its massive majority and the smiting of its political opponents.

Division on the other side of politics eased Labor’s path to re-election, but the strong performance of One Nation in Labor’s safest seats has delivered Labor a serious warning.

Hidden in the detail of the results is that One Nation turned Labor’s side of the electoral pendulum upside down. Liberal seats and Labor’s most marginal seats swung to Labor, but many of Labor’s safest seats swung strongly to One Nation.

Much of this comes about because the South Australian election was not a two-party contest. Only 13 of the state’s 47 lower house seats finished as Labor-Liberal contests. The majority of seats, 25, finished as Labor-One Nation contests.

The result is the Electoral Commission of South Australia (ECSA) has abandoned past practice of undertaking alternative two-party preferred counts in contests that weren’t Labor-Liberal finishes. In 2026 the Commission will do a two-party re-count in seats where Labor did not make the final pairing, but in every other seat report a count that is Labor versus whoever finished second.

In the past there has been Coalition criticism of academics for analysing Australian elections as Labor versus Non-Labor. For the 2026 South Australian election, there is no other alternative.

It creates a post-election pendulum that is a mix-and-match of party contests, perhaps a portent of where Australian politics is heading. All swings since 2022 will compare a Labor-Liberal finish with whatever pairing is produced for 2026.

Which is where the Labor-One Nation swings in safe seats are startling. Sometimes a change in final pairing can create an artificially large swing caused by the vagaries of exclusion order and unexpected preference flows.

That’s not the case in South Australia. The two-candidate swing against Labor with these mix-and-match results correlates with the decline in Labor’s primary vote and the rise in support for One Nation.

The chart below shows the relationship between Labor pre-election margin and 2026 swing. Labor’s safest seats are to the right of the chart, and the array of points below the horizontal axis show how many of Labor’s safest seats swung strongly towards One Nation. The blue points for Labor-Liberal contests are all to the left and show a clear pattern of swings to Labor. But the swing against Labor increases as Labor’s pre-election margin increases.

The swing was to Labor in areas where the Liberal vote held up, but against Labor where the Liberal Party slipped to third and the swing is measured against One Nation. And this swing is heavily correlated with the decline in Labor’s primary vote and strong support for One Nation.

In safe Labor seats, there was a switch in primary vote from Labor to One Nation. There are safe Labor seats in northern Adelaide where One Nation polled above 30%, levels the Liberal hardly ever achieves.

The trend in the above chart stands out as starkly in the tables below which aggregate results for Labor seats based on pre-election margin. Labor came out of the election with a higher primary vote and after preferences vote in the seats it defended on margins under 15% than it recorded in the seats with margins above 15%. There was a 5.9% swing to Labor in seats with margins under 15%, but 6.7% away in very safe seats with margins above 15%.

Again, this is a mixed swing based on One Nation replacing the Liberal Party as the second placed in seats. But the swing occurred on primary votes as well as two-candidate preferred votes, so its not an artifact of the change in final pairing.

At a normal election both the above tables would swing in the same direction. But in South Australia in 2026, marginal seats swung to Labor and very safe seats against Labor. The seats of Elizabeth, Light and Taylor had margins above 19% before the election, but after the election are three of Labor’s four most marginal seats under 5%.

There’s more on the results inside the post with a link to a draft analysis I’ve prepared. It includes results for all seats, tables of preference flows and a new electoral pendulum.

But I’ll start with some comments on the looming Farrer by-election.
Read More »SA2026 – huge win for Labor but a warning in the result

SA2026 – Does the SA Ticket Vote Savings Provision Matter

One Nation was accused of using South Australia’s ticket vote savings provision to harvest preferences at the state election. In fact One Nation’s tickets were entirely in line with the party’s promise of no deals on preferences. But it appears that registered how-to-votes should be clearer in saying number all squares.

As I explained earlier this week, South Australia has a unique provision in its Electoral Act that applies registered preference tickets to ‘save’ votes that would otherwise be informal.

Misunderstanding of the provision generated commentary during the election campaign about parties controlling preferences through the tickets. In particular there was criticism of One Nation’s how-to-votes that did not recommend preferences. The how-to-votes recommended voting ‘1’ for the One Nation candidate before saying to number all the other squares.

Was this just a way of encouraging One Nation voters to vote ‘1’ and then grab control of the vote’s preferences through the application of the ticket vote?

I’ll get on to the mechanics of the One Nation how-to-vote in 2026 inside the post, but first want to look at how the provision has worked in the past .

The purpose of the registered tickets is not to grab preferences. It is to ‘save’ votes votes that would otherwise be informal, to count votes that would be informal at a Federal election.

Some confusion is understandable as any mention of ‘ticket voting’ invokes memory of the now abolished group voting ticket system that distorted Senate elections until abolished in 2016.

The two systems are not comparable. Senate ticket voting turned preferences into a tradeable commodity allowing the engineering of election results with parties electing Senators despite tiny first preference vote shares.

That was possible because Senate ticket votes represented around 95% of all votes. In stark contrast, the South Australian ticket system applies only to a small percentage of votes, votes that would otherwise have been informal. The percentage of formal votes that have had tickets applied has been, wait for it, between 3% and 6% over the past 40 years.

And of those ballot papers that were saved, more than two-thirds were never counted out as preferences. They were saved by the ticket vote provision and only their first preferences were counted.

(For more information on the tickets, read this backgrounder produced by the Electoral Commission of South Australia.
Read More »SA2026 – Does the SA Ticket Vote Savings Provision Matter