Early Voting and how tonight’s Queensland Election Night Count might unfold

As usual I put this post here for the information of the tens of thousands of people Google sends here on election night.

I won’t be posting here tonight as I will be part of the ABC’s live Queensland election coverage. The broadcast will start at 6pm Queensland time on the ABC’s main channel. It will also be available on the ABC Newschannel, from 6pm in Queensland, 5pm 7pm in the southern Daylight saving time states, and the equivalent live time in other states.,

In this post I have a wrap of the final early voting figures, and a few warnings on how tonight’s count will unfold. Polling day counting will report quickly but the giant counts required for pre-poll voting centres will take longer to finish.

There is every chance that Labor’s results will look strong early in the evening, only to fade with later pre-poll vote counting.

There will also be a full results service at the ABC’s Queensland election site.

The Final Early and Postal Vote Numbers

• Total enrolment at the close of rolls was 3,683,368. This will be the first Queensland election where more than three million people will vote.
• On the final day of early voting, a record 234,055 votes were cast, so just under a quarter of a million
• The final early voting total is 1,620,434 or 44.0% of enrolment. This is up from 38.2% of enrolment in 2020.
• Around three-quarters of pre-poll votes will be counted tonight. All within district early votes are counted. Early votes cast outside of a voter’s home district will be counted as Absent Early votes next week and make up around a quarter of all Early votes.
• A total of 692,180 postal vote applications were processed and postal vote packs dispatched. This is well down from the 905,806 postal votes dispatched in 2020. As a percentage of enrolment, postal vote numbers are down from 26.8% of enrolment to 18.8%.
• Adding Early and Pre-poll votes together, the total is down from 65.0% in 2020 to 62.8% in 2024.
• Of postal votes dispatched, 48.9% have been returned representing 9.2% of enrolment. Most of these will be counted tonight.
• Taken together, Early votes and returned postals represent 53.2% of enrolment. Assuming the same 87.9% turnout as 2020, that means 60% of all votes were completed before today.

Lessons from the 2020 Count

All this has implications for how the election count will unfold tonight. Here are some comparisons with 2020 to consider.

• As a proportion of VOTES rather than enrolment, polling day votes represented 27.6% of all votes in 2020, Absent votes represented 34.0% of all votes, Absent Early 9.5%, Postal Votes 23.8% and Absent on the day votes 4.1%.
• The Labor two-party preferred percent was 55.6% on polling day, 52.6% for Absent and Absent Early votes together, 51.4% for Postal votes and 54.8% for Absent votes.
• So in 2020, once all polling day votes were counted, Labor’s two-party preferred vote was 55.6%, but this declined over the next week to finish at 53.2% once all votes were counted.
• There is every chance this trend will repeat at the 2024 election with Labor’s vote strong with the early reports on election night and decline through the evening and with post election day counting.
• This trend may be even stronger in 2024 because opinion polling has showed a narrowing of the LNP lead through the campaign. It may be the narrower polling results will deliver Labor a strong election day vote and a larger decline with later counting than in 2020.
• Labor’s early results may decline even further in 2024 because many postal and early votes would have been completed earlier in the campaign before the opinion poll narrowing.
• The ABC’s coverage will be based on projected results taking account of the likely decline in Labor vote in later counting. If the gap in late counting is larger in 2024, it may be that Labor does worse than toight’s projections.

Final Early Voting Charts

The chart below compares the number of 2024 early votes taken by day with the same day in 2020.

Postal Voting

A total of 692,180 postal vote applications were received, processed and postal vote packs dispatched, This is well down from the 905,806 postal votes dispatched in 2020. As a percentage of enrolment, the numbers are down from 26.8% to 18.8%. So far 48.9% of postal votes have been returned.

Of the 905,806 applications in 2020, 766,478 were returned representing 84.6% of dispatched postal vote packs. In total 709,128 postal votes were admitted to the count representing 78.3% of dispatched postal vote packs.