calwell

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.Read More »FED2025 – Calwell Distribution of Preferences