A quick post highlighting a new ABC Elections guide page by me for the Black by-election, plus an explainer on how the count is unfolding for the Queensland election. Details inside the post.
Read More »SA Black By-election plus Updates on 2024 Queensland Election Count
The South Australian Electoral Districts Boundaries Commission (EDBC) has this morning released its draft version of new state electoral boundaries. The draft boundaries are open for comment and will be finalised later this year.
The EDBC’s home page for the redistribution can be found here.
I’m a bit busy with Northern Territory election preparation so don’t have much time to offer comment. Helpfully the EDBC is the only redistribution authority in Australia that releases estimated margins for new seats.
Here’s what I find the most noteworthy points in the EDBC report.
Read More »Draft South Australian Electoral Boundaries Released
After looking the clear winner of the Dunstan by-election on Saturday night, Labor has finished with a narrower margin than expected.
Dunstan had been held by former Liberal Premier Steven Marshall since 2010. He squeaked home with a narrow 0.5% margin at the 2022 state election which meant the seat was always going to be a hotly contested by-election on his retirement. (For background on the by-election and the results see my profile on the ABC Elections website. Final figures published.)
On election night the Labor Party finished on 53.8%, boosted to 54.0% on Sunday by check counting. At that point, based on declaration vote trends at the 2022 state election, Labor would have expected to finish with 52.7% once all votes were counted.
In fact the race has been much closer. On Thursday 28 March, Labor’s Cressida O’Hanlon is on 50.8% after preferences with a lead over Liberal Anna Finizio of 347 votes. The count is at 80.5% of enrolment with only a handful of outstanding postal votes remaining to be counted. Due to Good Friday, postal vote return closes on Tuesday 2 April to be followed by the formnal distribution of preferences.
Labor will win after a swing of 1.4%, down substantially on the 4.5% swing seen on election night.
The table below shows how the count narrowed with the release of each successive declaration vote count.Read More »Dunstan By-election Updates plus problems with the SA Electoral Act
This is one of my usual posts on election night designed to deal with the surge of visitors to the site driven by Google searches.
I will not be posting here this evening as I am involved in the ABC’s live coverage of the Tasmanian election. The coverage is being broadcast live across Tasmania from 6pm eastern daylight time on the ABC’s main channel, and across Australia on the ABC News channel. There will also be updates of the important Dunstan by-election in South Australia during the Tasmanian coverage.
The ABC will also be publishing live results at ABC-online. Access the Tasmanian live results site here. You can also find the Dunstan by-election results here.
Inside this post I have information on the early vote at both elections.Read More »Coverage of Tasmanian State Election and Dunstan By-election
Update: Steven Marshall has now resigned and the by-election date has been set for 23 March.
I have now published a guide page for the Dunstan By-election at the ABC elections site. For that reason I won’t make further updates for this post.
The last count for the South Australian election was finalised today with the distribution of preferences for the Legislative Council.
Several weeks of scanning and data entry have turned all the LC ballot papers into electronic records. Today the records were fed into the SA Electoral Commission’s preference distribution software to determine the winning candidates.
Details on the count are provided in the post.
The above figures are derived from batching for ballot paper scanning. The detailed table of results below has 6.1% for below the line votes. The discrepancy is due to below the line votes that were informal or reverted to above the line votes after applying formality checks.
Read More »SA 2022 – Legislative Council Result Finalised
This post will be updated over the next few days with an analysis of the lower house election result.
For the moment I’ll just publish the final two-party preferred result and a new electoral pendulum.
Read More »South Australian Election – Results Analysis
Update on when the count will finish – While the lower house count is complete, the time-consuming scanning of Legislative Council ballot papers takes time. The button push for the distribution of preferences is expected around the Anzac Day weekend.
Update: With every vote now counted, there are some slight changes to the partial quota values. One Nation is 0.51, Labor 0.42, LDP 0.39, Family First 0.37. I still stick to my view in the post that Labor’s position will improve with scrutiny of BTL votes, with preference flows from the Greens, Animal Justice and Legalise Cannabis, and with the general leakage of preferences to the larger parties. But there is a chance the gap could close if there are any significant preference flows between the LDP and Family First. And there is still a chance that order could alter.
Original Post Follows
With the lower house counts being finalised today, it is time to take a closer look at the upper house election for the Legislative Council (LC).
Almost all Legislative Council first preference votes have been counted. The process of scanning and data entering ballot papers is underway. Once that is completed, the distribution of preferences will be undertaken very quickly by computer.
Nine seats are clear, electing four Labor MLCs, four Liberals and one Green. The final two seats look likely to go a fifth Labor MLC and the state’s first One Nation MLC.
If the election finishes as set out in the previous paragraph, the new Legislative Council will be 9 Labor, 8 Liberal, 2 Greens, 2 SA Best and a One Nation member. Assuming Labor appoints a President, then Labor would need the votes of three of the five cross bench members to pass legislation.
Read More »2022 SA Legislative Council Result
In this post I will keep track of the post-election counting for the South Australia election.
This post is an adjunct to the ABC results site where I will fine tune predictions through the rest of the count. If you want to follow updates directly, visit the results on the ABC website.
More commentary inside this post.
Read More »2022 South Australian Election – Post Election Thread
The final figures for pre-poll and postal votes were as follows –
Unlike every other Australian jurisdiction, Pre-Poll and Postal votes cannot be counted on election night in South Australia. The higher the rate of pre-poll and postal voting, the fewer the votes available for counting on election night and the lower the likelihood we will know the winners on election night.
In this post I explain the rate of pre-poll and postal voting at previous South Australian elections. I also provide charts of the rate of pre-poll voting by day, and the rate of postal and pre-poll voting by electoral district.
Most urban electorates should record a 50-60% vote count on election night which should be enough to call most seats. The seat with the lowest on the day vote will include Finniss (35%), Mount Gambier (45%), and Hartley, Colton, Stuart and Hammond under 50%.
Read More »2022 SA Election – Pre-Poll and Postal Voting Rates