Monday: Labor have retained Calwell. Strong preference flows on the exclusion of the Green candidate left Independent Carly Moore no path to victory. After preferences Labor’s Basem Abdo polled 55.1%.
Friday PM – the exclusion of the Green won’t be completed until counting resumes on Monday. Labor scrutineers are reporting a good flow of preferences during the exclusion of the Green which will ensure Labor wins. We will find out officially on Monday.
Count Status – Ten of 13 candidates have been excluded. The next candidate to be excluded will be Ghani (LIB).
Current Status – Labor’s current percentage vote is 48.0%. Labor’s candidate Basem Abdo is now certain to win. Independent Carly Moore needs 91.1% of Liberal preferences to win, a figure that will be impossible to achieve.
Likely Result – Labor win
The one seat where no preference counts had been available was the northern Melbourne seat of Calwell. This normally very safe Labor seat remained in doubt due to the new Labor candidate Basem Abdo polling only 30.5% of the first preference vote in a field of 13 candidates.
The AEC chose not to undertake an indicative preference count as the order in which candidates would finish was unclear. The AEC is currently undertaking a full distribution of preferences and this post will follow the progress of the count after each exclusion.
With knowledge of the how-to-votes distributed, Abdo is unlikely to lose to the second placed Liberal candidate Usman Ghani on 15.7%, a fact now confirmed with the most recent distribution which put Independent Carly Moore into second place. Labor’s victory became certain after strong flows of preferences to Labor on the exclusion of the Greens candidate.
The chart below summarizes the exclusions and distribution of preferences.
Current status after nine exclusions
Abdo (ALP) lead over Moore (IND) – 16,464 or 18.3%
Votes to be distributed – 20,038 (22.3%) votes with Ghani (LIB)
Moore (IND) needs an impossible 91.1% of preferences to win.
This last distribution has evened out the preference flows. So far Moore (IND) has attracted 42.4% of preferences, Abdo (ALP) 41.8% and Ghani (LIB) 15.8%.
With one exclusion to go, Moore (IND) needs 91.9% of preferences to defeat Abdo. Preferences on the exclusion of the Green candidate flowed 68.6% to Labor, 24.7% to Moore and 6.6% to Liberal. At an earlier count, more than 60% of Independent Samim Moslih’s preferences flowed to the Greens in line with his how-to-vote. That how to vote had next preference for Labor and it is apparent that many of these preferences then did flow to Labor.
Scrutineer information provided to me indicated an 80% flow of Moslih’s preferences to Labor before Moore and Green preferences splitting relatively even. Those numbers seem to be confirmed on the exclusion of the Greens candidate.
There’s running commentary on individual exclusions inside the post.
Earlier Counts
First Preference Count
Abdo (ALP) lead over Ghani (LIB) – 13,307 votes or 14.8%
Ghani (LIB) lead over Moore (IND) – 3,376 votes or 3.8%
Moore (IND) over Youhana (IND) – 1,106 votes or 1.2%
First Exclusion – Peach (IND) 487 votes
126 flowed to Moore at the top of the ballot paper, 29 to Youhana, 78 to Abdo and 20 to Ghani.
Abdo (ALP) lead over Ghani (LIB) – 13,365 votes or 14.9%
Ghani (LIB) lead over Moore (IND) – 3,270 votes or 3.6%
Moore (IND) over Youhana (IND) – 1,203 votes or 1.3%
Second Exclusion – Ragupathy (IND) 534 votes
142 flowed to Moore at the top of the ballot paper, 44 to Youhana, 59 to Abdo and 90 to Ghani directly below on the ballot paper.
Abdo (ALP) lead over Ghani (LIB) – 13,334 votes or 14.8%
Ghani (LIB) lead over Moore (IND) – 3,218 votes or 3.6%
Moore (IND) over Youhana (IND) – 1,301 votes or 1.4%
Third Exclusion – Issa (TOP) 2,240 votes
421 flowed to Moore at the top of the ballot paper, 126 to Youhana, 314 to Abdo and 249 to Ghani.
Abdo (ALP) lead over Ghani (LIB) – 13,399 votes or 14.9%
Ghani (LIB) lead over Moore (IND) – 3,046 votes or 3.4%
Moore (IND) over Youhana (IND) – 1,596 votes or 1.8%
Fourth Exclusion – Bengtsson (FFP) 2,572 votes
641 flowed to Moore at the top of the ballot paper, 154 to Youhana, 241 to Abdo and 358 to Ghani.
Abdo (ALP) lead over Ghani (LIB) – 13,282 votes or 14.8%
Ghani (LIB) lead over Moore (IND) – 2,763 votes or 3.1%
Moore (IND) over Youhana (IND) – 2,083 votes or 2.3%
fifth Exclusion – Hawli (CTZ) 2,912 votes
287 flowed to Moore at the top of the ballot paper, 628 to Youhana, 785 to Abdo and 325 to Ghani.
Abdo (ALP) lead over Ghani (LIB) – 13,742 votes or 15.3%
Ghani (LIB) lead over Moore (IND) – 2,801 votes or 3.1%
Moore (IND) over Youhana (IND) – 1,742 votes or 1.9%
Sixth Exclusion – Rosario-Makridis (LCA) 3,347 votes
864 flowed to Moore at the top of the ballot paper, 201 to Youhana, 614 to Abdo and 247 to Ghani.
Abdo (ALP) lead over Ghani (LIB) – 14,109 votes or 15.7%
Ghani (LIB) lead over Moore (IND) – 2,184 votes or 2.4%
Moore (IND) over Youhana (IND) – 2,405 votes or 2.7%
Seventh Exclusion – Toma (ONP) 5,009 votes
1,555 flowed to Moore at the top of the ballot paper, 1,045 to Youhana, 498 to Abdo and 1,261 to Ghani.
Abdo (ALP) lead over Ghani (LIB) – 13,346 votes or 14.9%
Ghani (LIB) lead over Moore (IND) – 1,890 votes or 2.1%
Moore (IND) over Youhana (IND) – 2,915 or 3.2%
Eighth Exclusion – Moslih (IND) 7,369 votes
952 flowed to Moore at the top of the ballot paper, 616 to Youhana, 4,530 or 61.5% to Garcha (GRN), 901 to Abdo and 370 to Ghani.
This flow upended the count as Garcha (GRN) has now passed Youhana (IND)
Abdo (ALP) lead over Ghani (LIB) – 13,877 votes or 15.4%
Ghani (LIB) lead over Moore (IND) – 1,308 votes or 1.5%
Moore (IND) over Gracha (GRN) – 2,022 or 2.3%
Ninth Exclusion – Youhana (IND) 12,478 votes
7,244 (58.1%) flowed to Moore (IND), 1,245 (10.0%) to Garcha (GRN), 1,963 (15.7%) to Abdo (ALP) and 2,109 (16.2%) to Ghani (LIB).
Abdo (ALP) lead over Moore (IND) – 9,9054votes or 11.0%
Gracha (GRN) – 14,945 votes (16.6%) the next to be excluded.
Tenth Exclusion – Gracha (GRN) 14,945 votes
3,698 (24.7%) flowed to Moore (IND), 10,258 (68.6%) to Abdo (ALP) and 989 (6.6%) to Ghani (LIB).
Abdo (ALP) lead over Moore (IND) – 16,464 or 18.3%
Ghani (LIB) – 20,0038 votes (22.3%) the next to be excluded.
Abdo (ALP) is now on 48.0%. Moore needs a near impossible preference flow of 91.9% on the exclusion of the Liberal candidate to defeat Abdo.
How much would the field be required to obtain of the remaining votes (I’m commenting at the 6th exclusion) to overtake Abdo?
COMMENT: I’ve just added that calculation. Moore needs 67.3% of preferences.
Interestingly, we are in a sliver of land that was moved from Calwell to Scullin in the redistribution. On polling day, the Liberal corflutes were for Calwell as were the How To Vote cards which confused potential Liberal voters. It was very helpful for the ALP member in Scullin.
Not relevant to this post but can you ask the AEC to check the results in Indi? Unless Wodonga recently joined North Korea I don’t think the Liberals have 99.97% TCP in the Wodonga PPVC.
COMMENT: I’ve passed that on to the AEC. The Wodonga PPVC took 12,000 votes. It looks to me like they have check counted the Liberal votes, entered them and knocked off for the day without counting the other piles. In post election check-counting, they count already sorted ballot papers but they should enter an incomplete check count.
If Abdo does indeed win by a more modest margin against an IND, what does that tell us about the seat going forward?
COMMENT: I’m not sure. I understand Carly Moore was a Labor Party member before the election and the contests has a whiff of local party politics. Some of the other Independents were against Labor over its position on Gaza.
Thank you Anthony (for all your sterling work). I’m sure you might hate it in future, but I’ve just bought 2 x Anthony Green Tee Shirts which I’ll only wear on Election Nights in Australia… which means they’ll last for decades 🙃.
There were also apparently some preselection shenanigans going on in Calwell when the previous MP announced her retirement. Word on the street is (I’ve removed the specific reference to a person here as I cannot verify it) and Abdo was parachuted in by higher ups in the party, which cheesed off a lot of people. Even the safest of safe seats don’t like being taken for granted or being messed with from afar.
Watching this count, it occurred to me that with enough candidates in a seat, you could theoretically have someone lose their deposit and get elected!
COMMENT: In which case they wouldn’t lose their deposit.
The desposit is returned if you get elected or reached the 4% threshold.
Thanks for the coverage. Very enjoyable to follow along!
Wow, that ninth round. It seems that a majority of people voting for Samim Moslih were following his HTV card. If that’s the case then virtually all of his preferences that went to the Greens will come back to Moore. With Youhana preferencing her above the Greens she should be confident of staying ahead of them. The Greens also preferenced Moore. Is it time to drop the ‘ALP likely’ tag?
COMMENT: If they were following Moslih’s HTV then the next preference is Labor. The scrutineer information I was provided with had a strong flow from Moslih to Labor ahead of Moore.
Thanks Antony, my mistake. If this was social media, I’d be posting a popcorn meme. Thank you for your service over the decades. I sincerely hope that you don’t retire totally from public life. It would be fascinating to see you turning your data analysis skills to issues of policy (not politics). Albeit with plenty of time to post your adventures on your bicycle from around the world. May the wind always be at your back.
Great coverage Antony. I think your latest chart update is wrong though; in the last round Youhana was excluded so the 16.7% at the bottom right of the chart should be for the greens?
COMMENT: I had data in the wrong column when I loaded the chart. It is now correct. Same answer for several others who posted with the same comment.
I have a question regarding scrutineers. You seem to value their input when making an assessment of the likely result. In a close and complex contest like this, where the final result is going to be reasonably close, they still do a fairly accurate estimate. Do they have set processes where they use a representative sample of sufficient size to predict the outcome with a small margin of error? Such a process would be beyond your average scrutineer so I wonder if the ALP has particular processes to assist their volunteers.
COMMENT: Two weeks ago when the AEC was doing indicative 3CP counts the Labor Party had its scrutineers observe the count in a representative sample of polling places.
Unlike the Melbourne Cup it seems that at each exclusion the donkey was prefered regardless of the colour of the excluded candidate. It would apear that many voters after casting a vote for there prefered candidate simply numbered the rest straight down the ticket. Thus the Liberal candidate down the bottom of the ticket was overtaken by the donkey (not aspersion on the character of Carly More).
I recall engaging with you on the OzPolitics blog ~20 years ago when you were starting to think about Senate voting system redesign. You favoured OPV ATL as opposed to FPV that I recomended. You argued that people should not be forced to place preferences that they did not have. The analysis of this count shows elements of such voter behaviour. Should this same arguement then apply to HoR voting?
Will you be opening a post to analyse the count in the Senate?
COMMENT: There are 13 candidates in Calwell in an electorate with a high migrant population. The seat has had a high informal vote as a result. It’s easy to see with low polling candidates that there is a tendency for some voters to revert to down the ballot numbering beyond a certain point. With other exclusions there was clear evidence of how-to-votes having an influence.
As to the Senate, by 2013 there were 50 columns in some states and three decades where 95% of voters marked only one square. Full preferential ATL voting for the Senate would have returned us to the days of double digit informal voting rates. I think the solution that was produced for the Senate has improved the proportional nature of the electoral system.
Prior to 2013 we were operating under a GVT system, and every man and his dog new that they could enter the lottery, and with the help of some unscupulous preference whisperers, manage to game the system and secure a seat in parliament. The problem was GVTs not whether we used OPV or FPV.
With electronic voting being offered in some elections, surely we can eliminate informal votes, by the computer ensuring that only formal votes are accepted. I have worked on polling booths and have found the manual counting practices to be quite archaic for this day and age. There must be a cheaper and more efficient way to count. (It may remove all the drama on election night, if a result could be delivered at the press of a button at 6pm :))
The problem with OPV is that most HTVs only indicate the minimum number of preferences from that parties particular side of politics. Consequently the vote will, at least in part, exhaust without descriminating between the extreme ends of to opposite side of political spectrum. FPV is surely the only way to ensure that the vote is given its full weight and will not exhaust.
Although we may have disagreed on this minor point, I would like to personally thank you for your contribution to our democratic process. It has been huge! Best of all, over all these years, I have not been able to pick your own personal politics. Well done. 🙂