There is always a massive surge of people visiting this site on election day, driven by the way Google searches report.
I’m sad to disappoint but there will be nothing from me here today. I will be busy doing the ABC’s election coverage all day, rehearsing this afternoon and then live analysis on ABC television tonight. There will be live coverage on the main ABC channel in NSW and the ACT, and on ABC News Channel across the country, and on iView.
I might do some tweeting this evening but it is difficult to do while on television.
If you are after information on electorates and candidates, or want online results tonight, you can find everything you need on my ABC NSW election site.
If you are after information on where to vote, visit the NSW Electoral Commission’s site.
I hope you are watching tonight. And I’ll be posting in coming days on the results.
It will be interesting to see what the two party preferred results will look like and to see the upper house results in each state electorate by what they won’t be finalised till the 14th-20th April
It’s funny how the TPP is at 54.3 for Labor but they still aren’t guarantied to get a majority, with Ryde and Terrigal going down.
COMMENT: The size of the crossbench means that just looking at the statewide 2PP misses that it is harder to achieve a majority these days. There are five seats held by crossbenchers that have underlying Labor majorities. There would be 50 or 51 Labor seats if you include the relevant crossbench seats.
Ready to call Terrigal, Holsworthy, Goulburn and maybe not Ryde ?
COMMENT: Absent and new enrolment votes are being added on Thursday morning, both of which should improve Labor’s position. Postal vote counting on Saturday morning will improve the Coalition’s position. See what tomorrow’s additions do to the totals.
Antony I think you may have called the election wrong hard to see Labor reaching a majority from here, if they’re lucky they’ll hit 46.
COMMENT: At about 7:50 ON Saturday night I called a change of government though not a majority Labor government. That was added later in the evening. Between midnight and 2am the next morning I had the chance of going through every single seat after turning off all predictive tools. Labor had a certain 45 seats and led in four others and that was the starting point for the ABC’s post election coverage.
There has been more movement away from Labor with pre-poll counting than with any election I’ve worked on. Maybe Victoria 2018 was in the same league. It has been inflated by there being many more pre-polls this time, plus there were issues with trying to work out how to deal with the extra pre-poll counting centres.
Tomorrow there will be thousands of absent and new enrolment votes added and these should favour Labor. We will see what the picture looks like after that.
I would point out predictions are always where a seat will finish, not how it will look three days later. Labor has a definite 45, a reasonable chance of 46 and still a chance of 47.
Yeah, true. But the thing is for the average viewer, or even someone looking around the website, the big red 47 is equivalent to you saying it is a majority government.
This is especially notable when newspapers take up the call. Really on election night people take your predictive software as a important, even more notable, section of you.
So, while you never quite said they had 47, and your suspicions on Ryde and Terrigal which you voiced at the end of the coverage, were correct. There is now video evidence of something that is deeply entangled to yourself saying that Labor had reached forty-seven. Like you said before the election, you always get remembered for the ones you got wrong. This seems to apply even when it really wasn’t you.
COMMENT: I am entirely comfortable with my work on election night and in the days afterwards. After a similar swing back on absent and postal votes after the 2018 Victorian election we changed some of the system’s calculations. We’ll have another look at it after all the votes have been counted for this election. I have a suspicious about one of the settings in the predictive software which I’ll check once all the counting is complete and I can access the system.
Thanks, although the same sort of post election swing back happened after the 2022 Vic election. You had the election night broadcast showing at the very least the independents from Mornington and Kew celebrating wins the post-2018 system called, only to wake up to find that they had lost. Surely its not just a setting that makes this happen. I have always enjoyed watching the coverage on election nights like the 25th of March, but it just seems a bit awkward to react as though Labor has won a majority, only to sleep it off. Maybe you could link the system to this trend or adapt it to the trend, do more of what you tried after 2018 or something. But anyway, make sure to have a nice Ryde with the rest of the NSW figures.
Oh yeah, about Aston, I managed to get access to the live feed and then I realized that the percentages the AEC gives in the TCP area of the xml file are actually your projected figures. Did they do this on their own, or did you give them a hand, because I don’t remember it from elections past, unless I’m looking at the 2022 election wrong.
COMMENT: The pre-poll and postal swing back was much smaller in Victoria in 2022 than it was in 2018. The twos seat you refer to, Kew and Mornington, are a different phenomena entirely, that Independents do very poorly with postal and absent votes. The AEC has used the matched polling place method since 1993 and we have always used the AEC’s set-up data and results so our numbers are always the same.
It’s the same method we use in all states, except in the states we have to build our own historic data which can cause problems, especially when there is a vast increase in pre-polls and pre-poll centres as in NSW, or where the Commission won’t separately report pre-poll centre totals as in Victoria. It makes the model less accurate than at Federal elections where the data is more disaggregated.
Yeah, fair I just checked the Vic coverage, there wasn’t the major party seat roll back that has been accented in this election. Anyway, I guess you’ll have to relive the time after Vic 2018 now. Thanks for replying.
5 seats that have underlying Labor majorities would be the Balmain, Ballina, Newtown, Lake Macquarie and probably Sydney while the underlying coalition majorities are Barwon, Murray, Orange, Wagga Wagga, Wollondilly, Wakehurst and maybe Kiama would I be correct Antony
COMMENT: That’s it.