The Speaker of the NSW Legislative Assembly, Jonathan O’Dea, has today announced that by-elections will be held for four vacant seats on Saturday 12 February.
Writs will be issued this coming Friday 21 January with rolls closing the same day. A closing date for nominations has yet to be announced.Read More »Date Named for four New South Wales By-elections
I’ve published a new election website for the ABC.
It’s a site covering the twice delayed NSW Local Government Elections to be held on 4 December. You can find the site it at this link.
I assure you this is not the most riveting election site I’ve published. It’s more public service than news. Given that the NSW Electoral Commission’s website is difficult to navigate, I hope my more simple display of candidates and results will prove useful for voters and political tragics. I hope to add more content on the political composition of councils over the next week and a half.
In the rest of this post I’ll summarise some statistics on the elections and point to one or two oddities produced by the elections.Read More »NSW Local Government Elections Website
Last week the Victorian Boundaries Commission released its final determination of the state’s new electoral boundaries. The new boundaries will apply for the next Victorian election in November 2022.
The draft boundaries were released at the end of June and I analysed their political impact in a previous post. There were major changes to the boundaries used at the 2018 election.
Of the 88 districts proposed at the draft stage, 56 remain unchanged in the final version.
I’ve prepared a listing showing the composition of all new electorates based on movements between old and new electorate. You can find it at this link.
Maps of all new districts, details of changes, and the Commissioner’s reasoning for the changes can be found on the Electoral Boundaries Commission website.
Political summary in a paragraph – a permanent shift of two seats from Liberal parts of Melbourne to Labor parts as a result of differential population growth rates. But it is not electoral boundaries but the scale of the Liberal Party’s 2018 defeat that is the bigger problem for the Coalition at the 2022 state election.
In this post I’ll analyse the political impact of the final boundaries.
Read More »New Victorian State Electoral Boundaries Finalised
While electoral officials will not always admit it, scrutineers play an important role in the transparency of elections.
Scrutineers are appointed by candidates as their representatives in observing the count. Scrutineers have the right to check the administrative paper work for the count, to observe all ballot papers as they are counted, to observe the checking of declaration envelopes, to challenge votes and request disputed ballot papers be tagged for adjudication. And they also play a role in spotting errors by counting staff.
If they represent one of the final candidates in the race, scrutineers perform another informal role on behalf of their candidate. Preferential voting means scrutineers want to closely observe ballot papers cast for lower polling candidates who will be excluded from the count. Scrutineers try to tally the destination preferences from these ballot papers, the flows of preferences to the final two candidates in the contest.
Since Electoral Commissions began to conduct indicative preference counts on election night, preference tallying by scrutineers has become less important. Now there are official counts that help parties know the close contests on election night. With this knowledge, the best scrutineers can be sent to the tightest counts for the post-election check count.
But what if there is no official preference count, and scrutineers don’t attend to do their two-candidate preferred estimates?
Exactly that happened in last month’s contest for Alice Springs Lord Mayor. One candidate was well ahead on first preferences. With no indicative preference count, and with no scrutineers doing their own preference counts, it wasn’t until the distribution of preferences that the leading candidate discovered he had been defeated.Read More »Alice Springs Mayor’s Two Vote Victory shows why Scrutineers Matter
For the last three decades I’ve been producing statistical publications on Western Australian elections and redistributions for the WA Parliamentary Library.
My latest in the series, summarising the results of the 2021 WA election in March, has just been published by the Library.
You can find the full series and the 2021 publication at this link.
Most of the publication is tables and statistics. Inside this post I’ve included the publication’s introduction where I set out the statistical highlights (if you are a Labor supporter) or lowlights (for Liberal supporters) from the 2021 results.Read More »My Analysis of the 2021 Western Australian Election has just been published
The resignation of NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian has understandably triggered changes at the highest levels of the NSW government. This includes Deputy Premier John Barilaro announcing his decision to resign as Minister, Nationals Leader and Member for Monaro.
I’ve removed my blog post for the Monaro by-election as it has now been published on the ABC elections page. I’ve left this post here as a stub rather than break links on Google searches.
I also wrote a piece at the time of the resignations for ABC news on what’s happening with the by-elections.Read More »A Quick Guide to the Monaro By-election
The resignation of NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian has understandably triggered changes at the highest levels of the NSW government. This includes Transport Minister Andrew Constance announcing that he will resign from state parliament as member for Bega “later this year” to contest pre-selection for the Federal seat of Gilmore.
I’ve removed my blog post for the Bega by-election as it has now been published on the ABC elections page. I’ve left this post here as a stub rather than break links on Google searches.
I also wrote a piece at the time of the resignations for ABC news on what’s happening with the by-elections.Read More »A Quick Guide to the Bega By-election
The resignation of NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian and her intention to resign from parliament means there will soon be a by-election for her safe seat of Willoughby.
I’ve removed my blog post for the Willoughby by-election as it has now been published on the ABC elections page. I’ve left this post here as a stub rather than break links on Google searches.
I also wrote a piece at the time of the resignations for ABC news on what’s happening with the by-elections.Read More »A Quick Guide to the Willoughby By-election
The WA Government has announced its reform proposals for the Legislative Council. The proposals are based on a report by the government appointed Ministerial Expert Committee on Electoral Reform.
You can find the Committee’s report at this link. The government has made some minor tweaks to the recommendations and will introduce legislation to Parliament tomorrow.
In summary the major features of the proposal are –
Read More »WA to Adopt State-Wide Election for the Legislative Council
This is not so much a post as a pointer to my analysis of the Northern Territory’s Daly by-election held on Saturday 11 September 2021.
It has resulted in the governing Labor Party gaining Daly from the opposition Country Liberals. Daly is the 25th by-election for the NT Legislative Assembly, the fourth to produce a change of holding party, and the first to produce a government gain from the opposition.
Here’s a link to the results page, and the page includes links to my background on Daly and my analysis and running commentary on the results from Saturday night.
In short, the by-election saw a higher turnout in indigenous communities where Labor’s vote is strong, and a lower turnout in semi-rural communities closer to Darwin where CLP support is stronger. The net result was a 7% swing to Labor, the CLP’s 2020 victory margin of 94 votes turned into a Labor margin of around 400 votes. Read More »2021 Daly (NT) By-election