The Australian Electoral Commission conducts a two-party-preferred vote in every seat, which is a count between Labor and the leading Liberal or Nationals candidate. In seats where the two-candidate-preferred vote is not Labor vs Coalition, they do the count later. With 35 seats now “non-classic”, the AEC needs to conduct those notional 2PP counts in more and more seats.
While there’s a lot of similarities in how Australians vote between the House and the Senate, they’ve never voted exactly the same. For a start, there are more options on the Senate ballot paper than the House ballot paper. Small parties will not run in all House seats (sometimes they run in very few) and thus can only attract Senate votes in many seats. This means the bigger parties have traditionally done better in the House, where they have less competition.
While my focus has been very much on the federal election, events have been developing in Tasmania, which culminated in a vote of no confidence on Thursday.
For this podcast Ben interviews two scrutineers about their experience in the recounts: Adelaide, a Liberal scrutineer from Bradfield, and KJ, an independent scrutineer from Goldstein. Ben also discusses the recount procedures he saw in Bradfield last week and the latest count updates from Monday afternoon.
We are still waiting for the final 2PP figures – they’ve finished in 149 seats and have even started the 2PP count in Bradfield now – but we now have basically all of the two-candidate-preferred figures in. We may not know the final Bradfield outcome, but for the purposes of today’s post it is close enough.
Yesterday’s final result in New South Wales was a bit of a surprise, with One Nation closing a primary vote margin of 0.21 quotas. Even after One Nation won another senator in Western Australia on Thursday afternoon, the gain they had made in WA wouldn’t have been another to do the same in NSW.
Prior to the election, I drew attention to the differences between my calculations and those of the AEC for a number of non-classic seats that gained new areas during the redistribution. Originally I had a list of 14 affected seats, but one of them (Nicholls) has reverted to a classic contest.
We are now getting to the point in the election count where all of the primary votes appear to have been counted. We don’t have all the preference data yet – Bradfield is obviously still in play, the two-party-preferred count is not quite complete, and we don’t have 3CP or distribution of preferences data outside of Calwell. But now that we know how many votes were cast, we can analyse the level of turnout, and how many people voted early, and voted with a particular voting method.
I had the opportunity today to visit the Bradfield recount, thanks to being appointed as a scrutineer. I did not attempt to challenge any ballots, but this gave me the best way to see how the process works. I was thinking of doing a podcast, and I may do that at some point if I get to interview some of the scrutineers, but for now I thought I’d summarise what I found in a blog post.
The vote count is now getting to a point where pretty much all primary votes have been counted, even if we don’t have all of the preference counts yet. So that means we can now begin to analyse the informal voting trends – where it went up or down, and what some of the causes could be.