ACT 2024 Postcount

Note: Analysis updates on Monday night may be delayed a few hours by a regular commitment.  

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Numbers in the form Labor-Liberal-Greens-I4C-others.  

BRINDABELLA: 2-2-0-0-0 plus contest for final seat Greens vs Liberals vs (apparently less likely) Labor

GINNINDERRA: 2-2-1-0-0 (no change)

KURRAJONG: 2-1-1-1-0 (Independents for Canberra gain from Greens)

MURRUMBIDGEE: 2-2-0-0-1 (Fiona Carrick gain from Greens)

YERRABI: Strongly expected 2-2-1-0-0 (no change)

Expected total 10-9-3-1-1 plus one Green or Liberal (ALP minority government with Green sole balance of power)

WARNING: ACT election analysis is highly technical.  This page is rated Wonk Factor 5/5.

The letter Q, where used without explanation, means the number of quotas.

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Welcome to my page that will follow the ACT postcount until all seats are resolved.  This year each seat has its own section with updates scrolling to the top for each seat.   Updates will be added frequently for the close and complex races in Brindabella (three party fight for one seat) and Murrumbidgee (within-party contest between two Liberals).  The other seats will only be updated if anything I consider notable happens.  

Last night Elections ACT were extremely fast at getting two provisional distributions out with the second arriving at 8:21.  I believe this was all the electronic votes available to include on the day and the reason there were no more afterwards is all remaining votes were paper ballots that still need to be scanned over coming days.

The current live vote totals include almost all votes cast on the day, with the exception of declaration votes and some votes cast outside the voter's electorate - these will total around 1000-1500 per electorate.  Each electorate will have something like 2500-4000 postals to go (last time Brindabella had the fewest) so the votes to add are likely to have a rightward lean, correcting for the leftward lean in the on the day votes.  In 2020 the final totals were significantly to the right of the votes used for the election-night distributions (by approaching 1%) but with a much larger on the day vote in 2020 I expect that effect to be muted if we see it at all.  

In 2024 the Monday distributions were well behind the live count so they may not be as useful as I have been hoping.  

Assessments in the header are all provisional til I have time to look at the seats in detail.  

Brindabella (2020 2 ALP, 2 Lib, 1 Green)

Expected winners: Mark Parton (Lib), Deborah Morris (Lib), Caitlin Tough (ALP), Taimus Werner-Gibbings (ALP)
Final seat: James Daniels (Lib) vs Laura Nuttall (Green) and Mick Gentleman (ALP).  Greens may be favourites, need to see new distribution for clearer picture,

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Monday night: Today's data entry for Brindabella is a fizzer as the numbers haven't changed very much (progressive quota is 5903 compared to 9084 in the live count) so we can ignore it and await the following days.  The votes added were postals and are not showing the break of on the day votes.   In the meantime in the live count, the Liberals are 2.58 Q Labor 2.04 Q Greens .55 Q and I4C are 0.45 Q, a very minimal improvement for the Liberals from yesterday.  As the live votes added include nearly 2500 postals, I would say that is unhelpful to their chances.

Intro (Sunday): As of Sunday Brindabella looks by far the messiest seat at party level.  In the second Saturday night distribution the Liberals have 2.72 quotas, Labor 2.02, Greens 0.50 and Independents for Canberra 0.41.  On the raw party totals it may look like this is an easy Liberal win barring very strong preference flows to the Greens but Hare-Clark is about candidates and not just parties.  Here it is significant that Labor starts with three well-polling candidates, Caitlin Tough (0.64 Q), Taimus Werner-Gibbings (0.48 Q) and Mick Gentleman (0.46 Q).  

What happens in the second distribution is that from this ridiculous 0.7 quota deficit, Labor nearly wins 3 seats to the Liberals 2, which is possibly the most bizarre thing I have ever seen in a Hare-Clark cutup. The minor I4C and Greens candidates leak so many votes from their tickets that Gentleman is able to stay ahead of both their lead candidates, just, knocking out Nuttall by 89 votes (0.016 Q).  There is then a huge flow of preferences from the Greens to Labor ahead of the low-profile third Liberal.  At this point the Liberals have 2.81 quotas to Labor's 2.64 quotas, but because there are still two Labor candidates in the count, vote-splitting between Werner-Gibbings and Gentleman nearly saves Gentleman; he loses by just over 300 votes (0.055 quotas), thereby closing down over 90% of Labor's beginning deficit off preferences and candidate effects. And, if the Liberal total now comes down by 0.06 quotas (which it has done and then some) and stays there (which it could) then Labor can win three seats.  Not so much the Ginninderra effect as the Ginninderra elephant, if it occurs.  (The effect here mainly kicks in by keeping Labor alive long enough to get all those preferences.  If it was the Senate system where most voters vote in effect down a ticket order they would just elect two with the third candidate excluded very early in the count.)

The problem with this wild scenario is that while the Liberal vote has indeed gone down, the Greens vote has also gone up.  In the current live count, the Liberals are on 2.57 Q, Labor 2.05Q, Greens 0.55 Q and I4C 0.45 Q.  Although Nuttall does not get the full benefit of the Greens' gain because of leaks from minor candidates,  Gentleman doesn't get that much of the ALP benefit and he has actually personally dropped back to 0.43 quotas in the current live count.  So there doesn't seem to be any doubt that Nuttall is over Gentleman if the button is pressed on the current live count.  If that happens and Gentleman is excluded, his preferences elect Tough and Werner-Gibbings with a surplus that's currently about 1590 votes, some of which will exhaust because some voters vote 1-5 Labor and stop.  In the current distribution Nuttall is 878 (0.16 Q) behind Daniels at this point.  However in the current live count, the Greens are doing 0.05 Q better than in the distribution, and the Liberals are doing 0.15 Q worse, so Nuttall may not be really behind at all (or not much behind at that point) and looks like winning, though perhaps the Liberals can make it a bit harder if they now have two candidates below quota.

One might expect (and last night I did expect) postals to put paid to this, but Brindabella has fewer postals than the other seats.  In 2020 the combined effect of the remaining votes to be added (postals, amalgamated small total absents, declaration votes and overseas) in Brindabella was to my surprise negligible (the Liberals went up 0.01 Q and Labor down the same amount).  I would caution here that 2020 was a weird year for postal voting behaviour because of COVID.  It may be that the postals are more right-leaning this year than 2020.  (See also comment by John Goss that points out that they were not a massive benefit in 2016 either.)

But there's yet another possible sting in the tail here - the Liberals have done so badly on day votes that it is not clear they are not first out of the three battling parties.  In the distribution Daniels is only over Gentleman by about 700 (0.13 Q) and that's less than the Liberals have dropped in the live count, so there is some possibility that Daniels is out first and the seat is then decided between Nuttall and Gentleman on Liberal preferences - though I think that Gentleman dropping back in the live count counts against this.  In this case Nuttall is advantaged by the fact that Liberal preferences going to the Labor Party have three candidates to go to and despite likely weak preference flows for her low profile could win anyway.  

I need to see the Monday and probably Tuesday distributions to have a clearer idea where this one is going!

Ginninderra (2020 2 Labor 2 Liberal 1 Green)

Expected winners: Yvette Berry (ALP), Tara Cheyne (ALP), Peter Cain (Lib), Chiaka Barry (Lib), Jo Clay (Green)

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Intro (Sunday)  As with Yerrabi there has been speculation that Independents for Canberra are in the hunt here but they are actually getting killed by leakage.  In this seat when their second-last candidate is excluded 40% of that candidate's votes leave the ticket.  (In Yerrabi it's even worse at 60%).  I guess this is the risk of the ticket-of-independents concept, there's no reason for voters who vote for one of your candidates to preference the others.

In the second distribution Labor is on 2.22 quotas, the Liberals on a predictably feeble 1.59, the Greens on 0.86 and Independents for Canberra 0.44.  But there are a lot of conservative preferences in Ginninderra, including from ex-Liberal Elizabeth Kikkert, who was disendorsed and ran for Family First who have bombed out with about 0.3 quotas.  

Labor incumbents Berry and Cheyne get elected easily, as does Liberal incumbent Cain, and Independents for Canberra wind up in 6th place.  In the distribution when they are cut out Mark Richardson has 3077 votes vs 4461 for Chiaka Barry and 4371 for Jo Clay.

In the current live count Labor is up to 2.26 quotas, Greens 0,89, I4C 0.45 and the Liberals are down to 1.52, a similar story to the other seats.   These changes mean Clay is currently notionally ahead of Barry and the last seat is between Barry and Richardson.  But while the gap has closed somewhat, the starting gap in the distribution is 0.27 quotas, only about a third of which would have been closed on the vote changes since.  And there's no reason to expect further changes to much hurt the Liberals because they do well on postals.  So as best I can tell there is nothing to see here, with Barry replacing Kikkert and all the re-endorsed incumbents returning. 

Kurrajong (2020 2 Labor 1 Liberal 2 Green)

Expected winners: Andrew Barr (ALP), Elizabeth Lee (Lib), Rachel Stephen-Smith (ALP), Shane Rattenbury (Green), Thomas Emerson (Independents for Canberra)

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Intro (Sunday) In 2020 Kurrajong saw the Greens win two seats.  In 2024 all the big four parties' leaders are running in this seat, including Independents for Canberra leader Thomas Emerson.  

In the second distribution Labor has 2.23 quotas, Liberals 1.51, Greens 0.99 and Independents for Canberra 0.80.  Unlike in other seats the I4C vote is nicely concentrated with the leader Emerson.  The second Green Rebecca Vassarotti finishes seventh, 1674 votes behind Emerson at the time.  She is 301 behind the Liberals' Patrick Pentony at this point but outlasting him wouldn't make any difference.  Emerson goes on to win by 1735.  The quota in the provisional distribution is quite small at only 4314 as Kurrajong has a lot of non-electronic votes to come. 

The current live count has Labor on 2.20 quotas, Liberals 1.41, Greens 1.08 and Independents for Canberra 0.82.  The Greens have improved by 0.07 quotas relative to I4C compared to the distribution but this is trivial in the context of a gap of 0.39 quotas (and the benefit is split between two candidates anyway).  The Liberals have gone backwards.  There is clearly zero doubt about the outcome of this seat.  

Murrumbidgee (2020 2 Labor 2 Liberal 1 Green)

Expected winners: Jeremy Hanson (Lib), Chris Steel (ALP), Marisa Paterson (ALP), Fiona Carrick (FCI) + 1 Liberal TBD

Internal seat battle: Amardeep Singh (Lib) vs Ed Cocks (Lib) - currently a tossup

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Monday night: It doesn't look like there is any new counting in this seat today.

Intro (Sunday)  In the Murrumbidgee second distribution Labor is on 2.00 quotas, Liberals 2.18, Fiona Carrick Independents 0.73, Greens 0.55 and Independents for Canberra 0.30.  In the live count Labor is on 2.02, the Liberals have dropped back to 2.06, FCI are 0.78, Greens 0.57 and I4C 0.30.  The party situation is clear as the Greens are 0.30 quotas behind Labor and Carrick at the point of exclusion.  The Greens can survive for one more exclusion if they get over the third Liberal, which on the live numbers they would do.  But it doesn't do them any good if they do, because they are 0.3 quotas behind Labor and further behind Carrick in the distribution, and it is impossible for them to close this massive gap on remaining primaries, so Fiona Carrick has gained the seat from Emma Davidson.  

The interest in this seat is in the rematch between Liberals Amardeep Singh and Ed Cocks.  At the 2020 election Singh outpolled Cocks and there was some expectation that he would win the recount when Giulia Jones resigned.  But the recount was determined by the next preferences of Jones' voters and it happened that they preferred Cocks as Singh was drawing his primaries from a somewhat different voter base to Jones; Singh was also disadvantaged by a common structure issue with Hare-Clark recounts.  

In the current distribution Singh beats Cocks by 188 votes after starting with a primary lead of 139 votes.  But there is a point where Singh is 0.6 of a vote (that is not a misprint) ahead of Cocks and 114.5 (0.023 Q) clear of Davidson.  What happens then in the distribution is that Davidson's preferences elect Paterson and Carrick with surpluses, and these surpluses that started with Davidson favour Singh over Cocks and cause Singh to win.  

But Singh has a few challenges here.  Firstly if Davidson is over him at this point he could be excluded, and the fact that his primary vote lead has dropped back to 86 votes now suggests that that is a serious threat.  In the live count the Liberals have dropped back enough (even though their losses are split between two candidates) that it looks like they would be out first and that it could well be Singh who goes, handing the seat to Cocks who clearly cannot get enough lottery tickets. 

There is another minor possible issue for Singh which is that if the Liberals come up too much against the Greens, Carrick and Labor (above the provisional distribution) then that pushes down the size of the Labor and Carrick surpluses (currently worth a combined 0.23 quotas) and decreases his benefit from these surpluses.  So ideally what he wants is the numbers to finish like the second distribution.  The third issue is that Cocks might gain enough on remaining primaries to beat him anyway, but in 2020 there was no real difference between them on the votes to come.  

In 2020 the combined effect of remaining votes in this seat at party level was minor (Labor dropped 0.03 Q with small gains for the Liberals, Greens and Carrick) and if that repeats then it is likely one of the Liberals will be out before Davidson meaning the race between Cocks and Singh will be extremely close.  But again noting that 2020 was a weird year for postal vote behaviour because of COVID, it could be there will be more of a break back to the Liberals on postals this time.  Since the Greens on current numbers are probably only something like 200 clear ot Cocks and Singh it would not take much of a difference for the Liberals to beat them.  At this stage we can only wait and see how this race develops in the coming days as it is too close and messy to call.

Yerrabi (2020 ALP 2 Liberal 2 Green 1)

Expected winners: Leanne Castley (Lib), Michael Pettersson (ALP), Suzanne Orr (ALP), James Milligan (Lib), Andrew Braddock (Green)

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Intro (Sunday) There has been some interest in this one based around a theory that Independents for Canberra's David Pollard can beat the Greens' Andrew Braddock for the final seat.  I have looked at this theory and I do not think a lot of it but I will explain what is going on here and some possible changes in the structure of this count.

In the second distribution Labor has 1.84 quotas, Liberals 2.27, Greens 0.69 and Independents for Canberra 0.555.  In the current live count Labor is on 1.86, Liberals 2.19. Greens 0.71 and Independents for Canberra 0.58.  

The second distribution isn't at all close.  Labor and the Liberals accumulate preferences from the remaining two thirds of a quota of unsuccessful parties plus leakage, and both climb well over two quotas, and ultimately elect two seats apiece.  At the point where David Pollard is cut out he is 1077 votes behind Braddock, which is actually further behind in quota terms than he started (0.19 Q).  However Pollard is only 106 votes behind Labor's Mallika Raj (.02 Q) and 452 (0.08 Q) behind the Liberals' John Mikita at this point.  The latter is bound to be an overestimate of the current count since the Liberals have actually dropped about that much since the distribution - but note that they have two candidates left so each candidate only drops about half of it.  

If Raj is excluded first her preferences elect Petterson with surplus, which elects Orr with surplus, and then votes leave the Labor ticket.  If Mikita is excluded his preferences elect Milligan with surplus, which then leave the Liberal ticket.  Votes leaving the major tickets are then free to go to Greens, Pollard or the other major.  Conceivably Pollard gets over one of the majors' spare candidates, then on their preferences gets over the other one, and then goes head to head with Braddock with .55 quotas of major party surpluses to chase him with.

But firstly I'm not that convinced Pollard quite gets over either candidate here anyway on the live count let alone after postals as Labor has come up alongside I4C (and Raj has come up slightly in the primaries) while the swing against the Liberals splits between two candidates meaning Mikita is probably only going to be down about 0.04 Q.  

Even if he does, the Greens' lead is very large.  Pollard would need something like a 63-37 split if all the major party preferences stayed in play and would probably not get that off Labor at least, but a lot of the preferences will be Liberal and a lot of Liberal voters will have voted 1-5 and stopped.  So I don't see how it is realistic for Independents for Canberra to win this seat.  

ACT Election 2024: Counting Day Live

Startline from 2020 election: 10 Labor 9 Liberal 6 Greens 

Likely result 10 Labor 9 Liberal 3 Green 1 Ind for Canberra 1 Carrick 1 undecided

In doubt: Labor vs Liberal vs Greens (Brindabella) - Liberal appears likely 

(some others not fully confirmed)

Labor/Greens combined majority (as opposed to shared balance of power) looks extremely likely.

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Comments will appear here scrolling to the top from 6 pm

11:15 End of night wrap: What we have seen in the ACT election is no major change for the major parties, with Labor, Liberals and Greens all down a bit on vote share at the moment with the emergence of Independents for Canberra.  The Greens were extremely lucky to win six seats in 2020 and an unsurprising but small decline in their vote was always a risk of costing them three.  While 10-10-3-1-1 still looks like the most likely scenario there remain some different scenarios in Brindabella where the flow of preferences between the left parties could still see the Greens retain against the odds, or there is a very weird scenario in which Labor gets three, but more likely is that postals snuff all this out with the Liberals winning.  A further distribution is needed here.

The two most likely fourth-party chances, Thomas Emerson and Fiona Carrick, appear to have won convincingly, but there has not been a wave of "independents" as some expected. Still, these are good breakthroughs after decades of only three parties winning.

Not much really changes in the ACT in terms of the majors.  If the Liberals do manage to tie Labor's seat count that will be another tick in the box for federal drag, but nothing like the tick seen in the Northern Territory.  I am not sure the question "how can the Canberra Liberals win?" really has an answer yet, until Labor really screw things up the place is simply too left-wing,  

10:08 In the second Murrumbidgee distrubution Singh beats Cocks by 188 votes at the end, but there is a tipping point where they are practically tied and 115 ahead of the Greens, so if the Greens come up it's a tossup.  In numbers since, that hasn't happened, so for now advantage Singh.  

9:44 There were updates to the item below spanning about 20 minutes.  Unknown to me a second distribution did go up, apparently at 8:21.  In this one in Brindabella the Liberals were on 2.72 Q Labor 2.02 Q Greens 0.50 Q.  Nuttall was just 87 votes short of outlasting Gentleman (suggesting she very likely is now ahead) and the Liberal over Labor margin is only 303 (this too has probably now flipped but may be irrelevant).  

8:51 Chisholm issue fixed.  What happens with Brindabella in the interim distribution is that despite Labor trailing 2.02 quotas to 2.77 quotas, they keep three candidates in the race who use the Ginninderra Effect (drink) to outlast the Greens, Independents for Canberra etc and get their preferences.  As a result of this at the point where Gentleman is excluded, Labor has risen to 2.63 Q vs 0.86 Q for the Liberals, but more than that, Labor have two candidates short of quota and Gentleman is on 0.76 quotas.  Now that's the interim distribution, but also since then the Liberals are down 0.19 quotas to 2.58 and Labor are up 0.09.  Labor's gain splits two ways, but I'm not sure the Liberals get any such benefit.  So on live numbers the Liberals may be behind - an astonishing scenario that may get snuffed out by postals but amazing it's even possible.  There is a possible threat to this scenario which is Laura Nuttall knocking out Gentleman (289 short in the first distribution), after which he would elect his ticketmates and the whole thing collapses ... but then Nuttall gets to go against the third Liberal for the final seat, so Nuttall isn't out of it either.  

8:35 Count issue in Brindabella.  The Chisholm booth is showing 900 votes for the Liberals but no votes for anyone else.  Excluding that booth the Liberals are currently on 44.2% not 45.5%, with Labor on 33.9% not 33.1%, which means the Liberals will have only a very narrow lead for the final seat on live numbers.  Still have to see how much that shifts and whether the Liberals fall behind by the end of the night.  

8:25 Greens improving across the board as day votes come in, but at this stage not by enough to save any of their endangered seats.  

8:19 I've looked especially at Brindabella because the distribution margin was reasonably close but contra to all their spruiking to the ABC, Labor are so far not gaining there.  

8:02 Doing some calculations so I can usefully track the changes in vote through the night now, will take a little while.  There was a theory that in Ginninderra the Liberals by running only four candidates would have preferences to throw to Family First or Belco.  What is happening is that the Liberal vote is so split that the individual Liberals are outlasting anyone who could get those preferences.  Note that while the primary vote gap Liberals to Labor is closing on on-the-day votes, it will blow out again on postals.  

7:53 Mick Gentleman looks like being defeated by friendly fire in Brindabella from Caitlin Tough and Taimus Werner-Gibbings.  Tough has polled well on primaries but is also getting a pile of Green preferences.  At the moment Gentleman is out by around 600 votes which is very unlikely to close.  (UPDATE: See above - Labor could win three seats).  

7:40 Murrumbidgee Liberal fight: There's a very close fight in this seat between Ed Cocks and Amardeep Singh.  Cocks was elected on a recount mid-term despite Singh having outpolled him, and now Singh might be turning the tables, or not.  In the interim distribution Singh wins by 128 votes.  Aside from the closeness of this margin (which could be overturned by further votes) another possible threat is that if the Greens lift the seat could be decided at an earlier point where Singh is only 18 votes ahead.  However, that's a pretty big ask given Liberals tend to improve in the postcount.  

OVERALL: None of the party results appear close at this stage.  At this stage there would need to be big changes to the final vote tallies for the results to be other than 10 Labor 10 Liberal 3 Green 1 Independent for Canberra and 1 independent.  (You can all tell I was looking forward to writing "1 Independent for Canberra and 1 independent", can't you?)

7:29 YERRABI DISTRIBUTION 1: Interim result is 2-2-1 with the Greens beating David Pollard (I4C).  The margin is currently 848 votes which is a large margin.  Pollard does have a few lifelines in terms of getting over some major party candidates but they are probably not worth a lot.

7:24 MURRUMBIDGEE DISTRIBUTION 1: Interim result is 2-2-0-1 with Carrick winning very easily.  The Greens are excluded over 1300 behind anyone except for the Liberals Ed Cocks and Amardeep Singh who are fighting each other for the second Liberal seat (this is a very close candidate fight).  The overall party result is very clear.  

7:20 KURRAJONG DISTRIBUTION 1: Interim result is 2-1-1-1 with Thomas Emerson winning extremely easily by 1327 over the Liberals.  

7:17 GINNINDERRA DISTRIBUTION 1: The interim result is 2-2-1 with the Greens easily beating I4C (who overtake the Liberals, though it doesn't matter if they don't) by 0.18 quotas.  

7:15 BRINDABELLA DISTRIBUTION 1: The interim result is 3-2 with the Liberals just over 0.1 quotas ahead of Labor.  That's not particularly close especially as the Liberals tend to lift in the post-count.

7:08 Interim preference distributions have reached Antony Green but not yet the Elections ACT website!

7:00 In Kurrajong the concentration of the vote with Thomas Emerson within the I4C ticket is outstanding!  And in the Liberals the vote is very concentrated with Lee.  Emerson is in a very strong position if these numbers continue.  The Carrick to Greens gap is 0.23 quotas.  

6:45 Those votes are up again! Still not sure if they are real or test votes but quick summary coming (this is 130 K votes so probably the early electronics)

Brindabella: Liberals 2.8 Q Labor 2.0Q Greens 0.5Q I4C 0.4Q - that could be 3-2 on current numbers but a way to go to see how much flow there is between the left parties.

Ginninderra: Labor 2.2 quotas Liberal 1.6 Greens 0.8 I4C 0.5.  That might look like a fight between Liberals and I4C but depends on the breakdown of Liberal candidates.  Looking at that while the Liberal vote is a bit lopsided with Peter Cain, the I4C vote is spread between candidates, could be leakage issues.  

Kurrajong: Labor 2.2 Q Lib 1.5 Greens 1.0 I4C 0.8.  Independents for Canberra looking good there to take the Green seat at this stage (Liberals are the main opposition)

Murrumbidgee: Labor 2 Liberals 2.2 Carrick 0.7 Greens 0.5 - need to see the distribution but Carrick ahead on primaries at this stage

Yerrabi: Labor 1.9 Liberals 2.3 Greens 0.7 I4C 0.5 so could be a race for the last seat between Greens and I4C with Greens ahead at the moment.  

More when we get the distributions but early on we could be somewhere in the general region of 10-10-3-1-1.  A lot of those are extremely rubbery at this stage!

6:35 Votes briefly appeared on the screen but I am unsure if they were real!  They may have been test votes.  

6:31 No figures yet but I will note the ABC coverage (not Antony Green, one of the reporters) just repeated a misleading claim by Fiona Carrick that in 2020 after being 4th on primaries she lost due to "preferences".  Carrick was 4th on candidate primaries but considering party quotas she was in effect a distant 6th since ALP and Liberals each had two quotas and the Greens were way ahead of her.  Based on that and given that preferences always flow strongly within a party (such that non-flowing preferences are treated as leakage) she needed an extremely strong flow of minor candidate and surplus major party preferences to beat the Greens, which didn't happen.  It had very little to do with her being in the ungrouped column.

6:22 ACT elections page intermittently overloaded/down in last few minutes.  

6:15 ABC reporting Labor sources are not bothered about how things have gone, doubt they are losing any seats (which needs some large swings) and have some hopes they could gain one or two.  No polling was cited so we'll see.  The Greens seem to be the party most bracing themselves for perhaps two or three losses.  

6:03 Right on cue we have a results page.  I'm afraid to leave the room in case 100,000 votes drop out of the sky!

5:45: This thing is on, and I've learned my lesson from the previous fast pace of ACT election night and had dinner already.  

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Intro (midday) 

Welcome to my coverage of the ACT's election counting night.  I did a preview of this election a few weeks ago and was hoping we might see a poll in the time since, but none has appeared; this election joins ACT 2016 in failing to attract a single public poll.   To summarise the campaign: scrappy all round; we will see who scrapped best.  

ACT elections are notable for the speed at which things happen on the night.  Very early on the night - even this time in the first hour if the counting schedule is followed - we'll get a provisional distribution based on the electronic votes cast at prepolling.  This gives us what would be the final result if those votes are representative.  Then over the coming days the task is to track how representative those votes are or are not, and how much that could affect the close seats that remain,  Late at night there is a second distribution that includes electronic votes cast on the day.

The indications are that prepoll will be not as large in 2024 (about half the actual vote) and this could provide some room for things to move around, at least between the first and second distributions.  But we should get a very good idea quite early of where this is headed and especially what non-Green crossbench challengers are competitive, if any.  

In 2020 Labor on average dropped about 0.8% per electorate from the second distribution to the final result with the Liberals gaining around 0.6% and the Greens varying by electorate (gaining 0.5% in Kurrajong but dropping a little in most others).  It should be this year that there will be more on the day paper votes and that this will reduce the break back to the Liberals, which is mainly caused by postals.

As each provisional distribution drops it may take me several minutes to analyse it and post comments.  There will be primary votes being manually counted on the night that won't be distributed as preferences today and I will aim to assess how much these votes should be expected to shift the outcomes in the distributions (if at all).  

I am contractually obliged at each ACT election to remind readers of the extremely wonky Ginninderra Effect.  This is a thing that happens at ACT and Tasmanian elections where sometimes a party that appears to be behind another based on raw primary totals in the race for a seat, nonetheless beats it by spreading its vote evenly enough between two candidates that the lone remaining candidate for the other party gets excluded and loses.  It's a particular hazard for Greens and independents and could be hungering for its next victim tonight.  

A reminder I'm on double duty with the NSW by-elections though ACT will be my first priority.

NSW By-Elections 2024 Live

Pittwater (Lib vs IND 0.7%), Epping (Lib 4.8%), Hornsby (Lib 8.0%) - ALP not contesting any seats

Pittwater expected IND gain, Epping and Hornsby LIB retain.  

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Updates will appear here from 6 pm, scrolling to the top.

8:08 Very distracted by ACT but a very large prepoll has come in and there is nothing dangerous there for Scruby.  Scruby's lead is too large.  

7:37 The pattern in the booth voting is quite set in Pittwater and something very radical has to happen in prepolls or it's all over and Scruby has won.  

7:11 Several more booths as well as postals in in Pittwater and things are not getting any better now for the Liberals after that aberrant third booth.  

6:57 Uneven swing between booths in Pittwater, the third one in actually swung to Ryburn on projected 2CP.   

6:51 Whopping swings to Scruby in Pittwater in the early booths, coming out at around 10% 2CP!  If this continues it will be over pretty fast.  Nothing scary for Liberals to see in the other seats, the Greens a distant second in both of them.  

6 pm: This thing is on, there's even a results page.  No action expected for at least half an hour.  

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Intro (9:20 am)

Tonight as the ACT election count will be so fast I am going to try to do double duty and to also keep an eye on the NSW by-elections for Epping, Pittwater and Hornsby, at least until the results of all are beyond reasonable doubt.  The coverage could be brief in nature on the night and then if any of the seats are still alive I expect to follow the post-count in the usual level of nature.  Of these only Pittwater is expected to be competitive, between teal independent Jacqui Scruby (who nearly won in 2023) and the Liberals' Georgia Ryburn.  The previous Liberal winner resigned after being charged with child sex offences.  

Scruby stands to possibly benefit here from the absence of Labor, Greens and Sustainable Australia, 35% of whose votes (a total of 6.8% of the formal vote) exhausted in 2023 under optional preferential voting.  (By the way I am becoming more and more opposed to fully-fledged OPV and have an article challenging the commonest arguments for it in preparation).  Scruby lost by 606 votes with 3387 from the left exhausting.  The theory is that since these people who wasted their preferences will have to vote this time many of them will vote for Scruby - on the other hand a fair share of them may just not vote at all as by-elections tend to have lower turnouts, and some may vote informal.  Also, because this is a by-election in an Opposition seat the voters may be gentler on the Liberals, especially with a female Liberal candidate.  Pittwater is entirely within Sophie Scamps' seat of Mackellar and the result is likely to be taken as a big litmus test for the strength of the teal independent brand heading into the 2025 federal election (with the Liberals possibly being able to blame the Libertarians for spoiling if they lose narrowly).  

Pittwater has previously fallen from Liberal to independent while Labor was in office; this happened in 2005 and by some margin too.  That said that result was for John Brogden's vacancy after he resigned as leader and from parliament, and also that was while the Coalition was governing federally.  So it's not a strong precedent for today.  

The 2023 NSW elections saw very large differences between on the day voting and pre-day voting (especially postals) and Pittwater was no exception.  This is something to keep an eye on if Scruby has a solid but not massive lead in day booth voting.  

In the absence of a Labor candidate and given that OPV makes things especially hard for parties coming off a low primary vote to win, Epping and Hornsby are not expected to be at all competitive and I expect I'll only be following those to the extent of making sure that's the case.  Labor could have had a shot at Epping given that it was somewhat marginal and a vacancy for a Premier, but victory would have been unlikely even given that and the party seems to have decided it's better to save resources and avoid potential embarrassment.  

Queensland 2024: The Polls Aren't Getting Much Better For Labor

Recent polling LNP leads approx 55.5-44.5

Possible seat result of this 2PP LNP 56 ALP 29 Green 4 KAP 3 IND 1 

I last wrote about the Queensland polling leadup back five months ago - was it really that long? - in The Tide Is Going Out For Queensland Labor.  At that time, there had been a few polls out showing Labor trailing about 45-55 two-party preferred, which as I explained in the article is historically not surprising in the slightest.  Five months on and less than one to go til the election, they're still there.  

However it's not as if nothing at all has happened in the meantime.  Since my last article (which mentioned the 44-56 April YouGov and the 46-54 March Newspoll), things may have got worse and then got better for the Government.  There's no need for me to repeat all the details of polls that are recorded and linked to on Wikipedia but there was a string of shockers for the government through to early September.  On 2PP they had only 44.5% (est) in Resolve February to May, 43% (converted estimate) in Redbridge February+May (two waves, not a continuous sample), 43% in YouGov July 8-15, 45.5% in Redbridge May+August, 43% in Wolf + Smith 6-29 Aug (Wolf + Smith is a sort of Resolve spinoff), and 42% (est and possibly generous) in Resolve July through September.  

While the Resolve type polls in this mix have the Labor primary lower than others because of their handling of the independent vote, none of these six polls had the Labor primary with a 3 in front of it, and Redbridge's first sample had the LNP as high as 47.  The average major party primary gap across these polls was 17.5 points.

The latest Newspoll (12-18 Sep) and Freshwater (26-29 Sep) in contrast, aren't that bad.  They're also very nearly identical.  Newspoll has 45-55 off primaries of 30-42 to the majors, Greens 12, One Nation 8 and others 8.  Freshwater has 44-56 off 30-43, 12, 8 and 7.  So both polls have a 3 in front of the Labor primary, albeit barely, and the major party gap is down to 12 or 13.  It isn't clear what preferencing method Freshwater is using but an implied 51.9% of all preferences seems stingy if it is last-election preferences (Labor got 55.3% with a lower Green vote in 2020), so it may be respondent, or Labor might have done badly on rounding.  

Leadership polls continue to bear the hallmarks of a decisive handover.  David Crisafulli has beaten Steven Miles as preferred Premier nine times out of nine, by 7 and 8 points in Newspoll and Freshwater, despite these polls usually favouring incumbents.  He also beat Annastacia Palaszczuk six times in the second half of 2023.  Miles' net satisfaction/approval ratings are by no means terrible, usually in the negative teens, while Crisafulli scores in the net positive teens - since April they're averaging about net -14 and net +15 respectively.

No public seat polling and not much by way of reliable regional breakdown polling has been seen.  There was some attention for a Redbridge finding of a 14% snap back to Labor in inner city seats, attributable to 50c bus fares and the like, but the subsample size would have been tiny and the effect too large for me to take at anything like face value.  That said, the 50c bus fare policy does seem to have proved more popular than cynics were accepting, with the LNP forced to (to some degree at least) match it.

Some internal polling rumours have been seen, including one about an expensive internal poll of Shannon Fentiman's very safe (or is it) seat of Waterford (ALP 16%).  This is supposed to show a 13% 2PP swing to the LNP.  The fate of Fentiman is of interest as a potential leader to pick up the pieces from some distance from the current regime, though she may not have earned too many team player points by dumping on Palaszczuk's anointment of Miles as successor.

If anyone predicts a Labor victory in this election and is correct, I've seen odds as long as $30 on that from some bookies; it's been a while since a change of government anywhere in the country was seen as so locked in this far out.  (It's currently as of Oct 1 come in to about $11).  

Seat model

There have been some suggestions Labor might get belted to as low as 18-20 seats here, one of them in a puzzling AFR analysis of the Freshwater poll that referred to "The survey’s two-party-preferred swing of up to 12 points, which is unlikely to be replicated across the board" when the swing was actually only just over 9 points.  Perhaps Labor will lose that badly but it is not what the latest polls are implying on a state basis.  Here's my usual conditional seat probability 2PP model for a Labor 2PP of 44.5%.  I have just shown the Labor seats side since on a 2PP in the mid-50s, the LNP is unlikely to lose any seat to Labor that it won in 2020.  In the "proj" column the table shows the projected ALP margin (negative = loss) after considering current margin and personal vote effects, and the "prob" column shows what the model thinks is the chance Labor retains the seat if the 2PP is 44.5.  Note that I ignore by-elections where the incumbent retains, aside from making personal vote adjustments.  Where there is a change of ownership in a by-election (a "disrupted seat") I average the last-election and by-election margins for the new baseline.  (Ipswich West is a rare case of a disrupted seat where the by-election winner isn't recontesting, which might make things a little better for Labor than I have it here.)

In total, the model has Labor on for about 31 2PP wins in seats it currently holds off this 2PP, a net loss of 21 seats.  It could plausibly lose a few more to the Greens (see below).   The swing could always and almost certainly will break unevenly - for instance a bigger swing in the outer suburbs and regions is generally expected than in the inner cities - so some of the individual probabilities above will be nonsense.  But should that happen a number of wobbly Labor seats in the inner city will be saved, some regional or outer suburban seats will fall well above the swing line, but some of the LNP margin could well be wasted overkilling Labor's many non-Brisbane seats on 7% and below (especially the coastal retirement belt wins from 2020).  All else being equal it shouldn't make a lot of difference to the 2PP-to-seats conversion.  So for some of the scenarios doing the rounds to fly, I think LNP needs a bigger gun.  60-40, for instance, would be very likely to put Labor below 20 seats.   It is harder for the LNP to match the scale of the 2012 "Tarago election" where Labor were reduced to seven seats because compulsory preferencing means Labor will get a better 2PP off a given set of very bad primaries at this election than otherwise, even if the preference flow to them is weak.  Exhausting votes in optional preferential voting tend to magnify the primary vote leader's lead on 2PP.  

(A note re Murrumba - I have given Steven Miles a leader bonus, but I suspect his hold is shakier than the odds above imply, given outer suburban issues and the fact that he has been Premier for only a short time.)

ALP vs Green - And Associated Nonsense

Taking the Newspoll and Freshwater polls at their word, there is currently a 9.6% primary vote swing against Labor, 2.5% to the Greens and about 6.6 to the LNP.  If that is anything near uniform then the Greens easily knock Labor into third in Cooper and McConnel and therefore should win both (though the LNP might not be completely disinterested in either).  The next two targets a long way up the tree are Greenslopes and Miller, but Labor beat the Greens at the 3CP stage by 17.7% and 20.8% in those respectively last time, so the Greens would need to do three or four points better than the state Labor-to-Green swing in these seats to pick them up.  There is some history of the Greens outdoing their state swings in heavily targeted inner city seats and so these two in particular are worth keeping an eye on.  

The Greens' usual game of talking up their chances before the election whether they are competitive in the seats mentioned or not (they've been doing it for decades) has been met with disinformation from some ALP supporters.  Retiring Attorney-General Yvette D'Ath made the ludicrous claim that the Greens' thought they might pick up a few seats meant they had a backdoor preference deal with the LNP.   In fact, in none of the Greens' target pickups would they be relying on LNP preferences to win; in all of them the method would be pushing Labor into third and winning on Labor's preferences.  On uniform swing this would even happen in South Brisbane, which the Greens hold, rendering LNP preferences irrelevant to the Greens' prospects.  

D'Ath threw in the completely baseless claim that "I’m not quite sure why the Greens are celebrating the fact that a vote for them will put David Crisafulli into government,", which had overtones of the sort of a vote-for-X-is-a-vote-for-Y disinformation that Attorneys-General everywhere should be banning not promoting.  To the extent that there was any attempt at an argument behind it it was supposedly that Labor would need these particular seats to form the government Premier Miles has already by political standards conceded that they won't be forming anyway.  In any case no evidence was presented that the Greens would back the LNP in any hung parliament scenario even if it did somehow occur. 

Weeks later this nonsense resurfaced on Twitter in the form of several gossipping pro-Labor accounts who had "heard" (from unstated sources with zero evidence) that the Greens had done a preference deal with the LNP - as if it would be worth the embarrassment factor to the LNP of accepting said "deal" or as if any significant number of Greens voters would follow a card directing them to the LNP anyway.  

It is supposed to be the case that educated voters are realigning towards parties of the broad left.  It is a mystery to me, given that, that some ALP supporters continue to make these desperate and dishonest claims that seem calculated to repel any voter with a brain.

Others

There isn't a lot of useful intelligence about the likely fate of the now four Katters Australian Party MPs, after One Nation's sole MP Stephen Andrew was disendorsed and switched to KAP.  Four of the last five polls had KAP on 1% statewide with Wolf + Smith the sole holdout for them on 3%; uComms early in the year had 3.9% so I suspect the statewide polling for KAP just isn't all that useful. The disorder in Mirani looks like an opening for the LNP to get this one back in a "change" election.  They need very large swings to dislodge any of the other three, but Hinchinbrook will be worth keeping an eye on at least early on election night to see if there is any chance of that.  

There doesn't seem to be any buzz about independents at all with the exception of whether Sandy Bolton can retain Noosa, currently on a large margin.   [UPDATE: We should however pay attention to Margaret Strelow, IND for Rockhampton and long-time local Mayor, who nearly won in 2017 but was a victim of exclusion order with LNP prefs putting One Nation ahead of her and stopping her from beating Labor.]

Crisafulli Misleading Claims re OPV

False claims about the voting system are also coming (again) from Opposition Leader Crisafulli.  Asked about LNP preference recommendations between Labor and the Greens (the LNP are recommending preferences to Labor), Crisafulli said "Queenslanders shouldn't have to be forced to vote for anyone they don't want to.  It's undemocratic."

But compulsory preferential voting doesn't force anyone to vote for anyone they don't want to (it doesn't even force them to vote formally at all).  If a voter puts, say, Labor second last and the Greens last, they have hardly "voted for" those parties - they have voted against them, except that in the hypothetical case of those being the last two standing they have ranked one above the other.  And in 2020 that choice, as made by someone voting 1 LNP, became an active choice in just one out of 93 seats - this year it could be zero.  

I am personally sick of this snowflake argument for optional preferential.  Just get over it - if you dislike one party less than the other rank them accordingly, or if you don't care or want to make some kind of protest then you can randomise your preference.  The argument is self-indulgent and ignores the extent to which OPV can suppress real preferences that voters would have if asked, but that the voter will not exercise under OPV because of satisficing or misunderstanding the voting system.  I would be happy in principle if those who had an ideological objection to giving full preferences - and only those people - could declare their objection in advance and cast an exhausting section vote that would be counted - but such a system would carry privacy risks and the risk that other voters might think they could do it too. 

There is a real debate about the suitability of compulsory preferential as it currently exists, but that is about formality, not about voters who whinge about not being allowed to exhaust their ballot.

Crisafulli has also claimed that the reintroduction of compulsory preferences by Labor was "an electoral gerrymander that they have rigged", thereby comparing a choice of a different and widely used election system - albeit motivated by a belief it would bring an advantage - to gerrymandering, malapportionment and rigging.  (The term "gerrymander" is widely used in Queensland for the malapportionment Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen thrived on, though he did not start it.)  And he has said " We know the Greens and Labor are one, and the Labor Party know that there is a real prospect of a larger contingent of Greens giving them preferences and giving them supply and enabling a fourth term in 14 years"  This makes no sense whatsoever since any elected Green, by definition, is not giving anyone else any preferences.  

Some other LNP operative has said "an LNP government would restore Queensland’s ‘just vote 1’ system and do away with Labor’s dealmaking system".  But OPV is only a "just vote 1" system if the voters and parties want it to be, and preference recommendation deals can occur under it just as they can under CPV.  

ACT Election 2024 Preview

2020 BASELINE: ALP 10 Lib 9 Green 6 (ALP-Green coalition government)

At election ALP 10 Lib 8 Green 6 FF1 (1 Liberal incumbent disendorsed and joined FF)

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This is my preview page for the 2024 ACT election.  In the absence of any reputable polling whatsoever for the entire term (seriously!) there is not too much of use I can say about outcomes, beyond pointing to some possibilities.  What I can do is look at the nature of the contests based on the 2020 result and the history of ACT elections.  The ACT is of special interest to me because it uses a variant of Hare-Clark, the system also used in Tasmania.  I may get around to writing a special effective voting article but in case I don't here's one I prepared earlier.  Firstly, I've revised my view on something about the theory of ACT elections.

Well Yes There May Be A Bit Of Federal Drag In The ACT

Federal drag is the theory and fact that it is harder for state and territory governments to do well at elections when the same party is also in power federally, especially if the federal government is not that popular.  We saw this effect in spades in the recent NT election when the first of Labor's mainland dominos fell back with a drubbing that reduced Labor to 4 seats out of 25.  One could hardly blame the feds for all of that - though one could also blame them for more than some might like to.  (There was a lot of talk about how the Voice helped Labor hold up in the majority First Nations seat, the corollary of that is that it helped them get smashed everywhere else).  

Previously when I have looked at the federal drag effect in the very left-wing ACT I have not found anything to see - there just isn't a corellation between federal drag and government seat share change.  However, on a careful look at the history of ACT elections there seems to be something - you just need to ignore the swing from 1989 and 1992, and also looking at the balance of seats between the majors shows the effect up more strongly than whether a government gains or loses seat share, because the proportional size of the crossbench fluctuates a lot more than elsewhere.  The reason for ignoring 1989-1992 is that the 1989 ACT election saw a massive and largely once-off protest vote against self-government with the major parties managing only 37.7% of the vote between them.  Labor increased from 5 of 17 seats to 8 of 17 in 1992 in the face of federal drag, but this was mostly really about a protest vote in the 1989 election disappearing.  

From 1992 onwards, a kind of normality returned in terms of the majors getting most of the votes. In the early elections independents and ACT-specific parties were common crossbenchers, while lately the crossbenchers have been Greens.  In 1995, Labor were federally dragged near the end of the Keating government and lost two seats and government (they also lost a federal by-election in the ACT that year).  In 1998, the Carnell Liberal government was in its first term but was now federally dragged by the Howard government (also in its first term for what that's worth); the Carnell government broke even in seat terms and retained office.  In 2001, the now Humphries Liberal government was still federally dragged and lost office because Labor under Jon Stanhope gained two seats.  

In 2004 Labor, now in government opposite the feds, gained another seat and won the Territory's only ever majority.  In 2008 Labor was now in office federally and dropped two seats to the Liberals' one (all to the Greens).  In 2012 Labor, still in office federally and unpopular there, gained one seat but the Liberals gained two.  In 2016 the Coalition was back in government federally and Labor again became the largest party in the new 25-seat parliament.   In 2020, both major parties lost two seats to the Greens, the Liberals failing to make any inroads against a 19-year old government.  Overall, most ACT elections (2020 an exception) may show some seat-level pattern of federal drag, just not a very strong one.  

What the ACT doesn't seem to show (Labor dropping seats to the Greens in 2020 perhaps excepted) is a clear age of government effect.  Antony Green here notes the "forever government" effect and how rare this is these days.  In the ACT's case it helps that the ACT is so left-wing that it is very hard these days for the Liberals to win.

The Post-2020 Landscape And What It Means For 2024

I covered some of the anatomy of the 2020 result where the Greens won six seats in a previous article.  Since then there has been a redistribution with a substantial impact on two seats and a minimal impact on a third.  In brackets I note who the effective last-seat contest was in 2020, with the winner(s) before the "vs" and the losers afterwards).

Brindabella:  (Green 1 vs ALP 3) In 2020 Labor won 2.44 quotas, Liberals 2.31, Greens 0.65.  This may look like an easy win of the fifth seat for the Greens but it wasn't, because of what I call the "Ginninderra Effect" (old and slightly silly explainer piece here).  When a party with multiple quotas spreads its vote across a few candidates, it may defeat a single candidate who appears to be ahead on party total.  At a certain point of the distribution Labor had closed the gap to 2.59 quotas vs 0.71 quotas, but in candidate terms Johnathan Davis (Grn) was just 82 votes ahead of Taimus Werner-Gibbings. 

It's in general a reliable aspect of ACT elections that major parties will keep spreading their votes like this.  The redistribution was worse for Labor than for the Greens, but in a case like this the in-theory loss from the primary vote splits between three candidates.  As a result the Greens' notional lead over Labor comes out at about 0.011 quotas.  The Greens are especially vulnerable here to losing votes to minor parties, because any vote the Greens lose counts fully while any vote lost by Labor, all else equal, splits three ways.  So on paper the Greens' seat is precarious to say the least.  On the other hand, both majors have a long-term MP retiring, which doesn't do wonders for one's primary vote and preference flows in Hare-Clark.  

This is also the seat where the Greens, after very narrowly winning the seat last time, had a mid-term disaster which leaves them very vulnerable to fourth party competition.   On the other hand instead of having no incumbent they at least now have a part-term incumbent in the seat.

Ginninderra: (Green 1 and Lib 2 vs ALP 3) In 2020 Labor won 2.40 quotas, Liberals 1.60. Greens 0.75 and the Belco Party a very leaky 0.56 Q.  The Belco Party leaded Liberal preferences to be any shot but had fallen to 0.14 quotas behind the Liberals by the time they were excluded.  Overall Labor did best on preferences here, plus a small benefit from vote-spreading within their ticket, but it wasn't quite enough; at the key exclusion point Gordon Ramsay (ALP) on .789 quotas was excluded trailing Peter Cain (Lib) .807 Q and Jo Clay (GRN) .868 Q.  So Labor could gain the seat with a small swing off the Liberals or a relatively small one off the Greens (0.1 of a quota is 1.67%).  However, for the first 0.02 quotas Labor notionally gains, those votes are splitting two ways at candidate level.  

New entrants aside, this seat has become more complicated by the Liberals disendorsing their previous ticket-topper Elizabeth Kikkert, who is running for Family First.  They are also running only four candidates, which if they are excluded frees their fifth vote among those voters voting 1-5 and stopping to flow to Bill Stefaniak of Belco Party, Kikkert or anyone else perhaps still in the race (if indeed any of those are by that stage). Belco Party itself is only running three candidates, freeing its voters' preferences to flow to the Liberals (they ran five last time, which did not assist the Liberals who nearly lost the seat).  The seat has not been redistributed.

Kurrajong:  (Green 2 vs Lib 2) This was a major focus of my 2020 post-article.  Labor started with 2.28 quotas, Liberals 1.66, Greens 1.38 but the Greens overcame a 2324 primary vote gap to win their second seat by 470 (.056 quotas), the only time the Greens ever won two seats in a five-seat Hare-Clark division in either Tasmania or the ACT.  The win came primarily off Labor preferences and preferences from micro-parties, especially the 0.30 quotas polled by Canberra Progressives.  The Liberal campaign in this seat in 2020 was a disaster and they should be helped by the fact that their sole incumbent is now the party leader, which tends to provide a small boost.  On the other hand, the redistribution in this seat has been highly adverse to the Liberals, docking them 0.075 quotas and adding 0.05 to the Greens per Ben Raue's estimates.  (The draft redistribution was adopted with no changes.)  Notionally a small amount of the Liberal loss splits two ways but still they are starting something like 0.17Q behind (2.8%). 

Murrumbidgee: (Green 1 vs IND) Not much excitement here in 2020 with Labor 2.16 quotas Liberal 2.13 Green 0.7 with such challenge as there was to the 2-2-1 outcome coming from Fiona Carrick (IND) on 0.42 quotas.  After preferences the final margin was hefty, 0.345 quotas (5.75%) to the Greens.  The redistribution moves just over 0.02 Q from Labor to the Liberals but has little impact on the Greens.  The Liberals lose the leader bonus in this seat as Jeremy Hanson is no longer leader.  

Yerrabi: (Greens 1 vs Lib 3) Liberals 2.44 quotas Labor 2.05 Greens 0.61.  A seat of very little interest in the 2020 count, this eventually finished with the Greens' Andrew Braddock crossing the line 0.26 quotas clear of the second of two Liberals below quota.  But because there were two Liberals below quota, that figure underestimates how much Braddock won by, a Green to Liberal swing more like 0.17 Q (about 2.8%) rather than 0.13 Q would be needed to switch the seat, so about twice as "safe" as Kurrajong.  The seat was not redistributed.  

The Liberals lose their leader bonus in this seat, as Alastair Coe was leader in 2020 but is not anymore (indeed he quit the parliament mid-term).    

One thing that is notable about 2020 is that Labor achieved two quotas clean in every electorate, but were unlucky in not turning an excess of .34 quotas per seat average into any more seats.  This means that knocking Labor below ten seats requires significant damage.  In their weakest seat, Murrumbidgee, a swing of .16 quotas (2.7%) is needed to knock Labor below two quotas.  But even then, quota totals like 1.8 and 1.9 are almost invariably enough to win two seats in the ACT given all the ballot paper clutter parties polling fractions of a quota.  So there needs to be a pretty heavy swing against Labor from the 2020 result for Labor to fall below ten.  

This suggests that if the ACT's nearest equivalent of "federal drag" works in this election, the most likely way it works is the Liberals improving on their 2020 disaster and making slight gains, with Yerrabi and Kurrajong their nearest misses last time.  However this is complicated by ...

Fourth Parties and Independents (Or Not)

I'll start with this: the self-styled "Independents for Canberra" are not independents.  They are a registered political party that screens candidates for alignment with a set of principles and that has extensive party policies.  In the event of any members of this party getting elected and wanting to run again under the same banner they will be dependent on the party apparatus for re-endorsement and that will be influenced by what the party makes of whether they have adhereed to party principles.  In theory, elected I4C MLAs will be free to vote however they like and this is supposed to be the differentiation point with party politics. However, formalised parties that have claimed this have collapsed over differences in direction once elected before (eg Jacqui Lambie Network Tasmania, though JLN was much flakier about its expectations of candidates).  Also the free vote is subject to being assessed to have voted in line with party principles; anything else could lead to disendorsement for a future election, so how free is it really?  It's really Labor, with its understanding that crossing the floor even once can be career death (but isn't always) that is the odd one out here; it's quite common for minor parties to have some kind of theoretically free vote.     

The ACT's unfair electoral architecture encourages indies to form registered parties in order to have access to a column other than ungrouped, but Independents for Canberra are not a token party as a vehicle for ballot column access in the way "Fiona Carrick Independent" is such a token party vehicle for Carrick, who effectively is an independent.  They have the "independent" brand while also having the safety in numbers aspect of running group branding and shared policies to connect multiple candidates across electorates.  To me, this is trying to have your cake and eat it too.  

There are, in total, nine party groups besides Labor, Liberal and Greens contesting the election.  These are:

* Independents for Canberra, "Family First" (I cannot stand this party name so it can have scare quotes at its first mention too) and Animal Justice everywhere, though AJP are in the ungrouped column in Yerrabi because they only have one candidate there.

* First Nation Party in Brindabella, Kurrajong and Yerrabi

* Belco Party in Ginninderra and Yerrabi

* Labour DLP (seriously, this is still a thing? In the ACT? In 2024?) in Ginninderra and Kurrajong

* Libertarians in Ginninderra

* Strong Independents (vehicle for Peter Strong) in Kurrajong and Fiona Carrick Independents (vehicle for Carrick) in Murrumbidgee

* There are also ungrouped independent or unaligned candidates in every seat, none likely to be a seat threat this time around, and some of them serial candidates. (An unaligned candidate is a shy independent who declines to have "independent" on the ballot paper.)  

With the number of parties registering I was much fearing a ballot paper design disaster here but it could have been worse, with no seat having more than ten ballot columns.  All the same I think that next election the number of members required to register a party in the ACT should be increased.

Unusually, the ACT publishes candidate statements but the Greens and Canberra Liberals among others have declined to provide them.  

Independents for Canberra have impressively managed to field 20 candidates, including full slates in Murrumbidgee and Kurrajong.  Their lead candidate in the latter Thomas Emerson describes himself as the leader of Independents for Canberra (having a leader being another sign that I4C is a party) and was until May a staffer for David Pocock.  Emerson's name was easily the most mentioned in dispatches as a likely fourth party winner when I asked informed followers for their impressions on Twitter last night, several predicting he would win and many of those suggesting he would be the only one, or at least the only one from his ticket.  I have also however seen some commenters suggesting they will not win anything at all, one describing them as a "hot mess".  

One winning method here is obvious: a teal-style candidate who polls even as little as 0.4 quotas (6.7%) in Kurrajong rips votes from Labor and the Greens, tips out the second Green and beats the Liberals easily on Green preferences - unless, that is, the Greens are very good at spreading their votes between two candidates.  (Which is hard as this is their leader Shane Rattenbury's seat and he's very popular.)  That sort of vote is a fraction of what Pocock polled. Even though the strategic logic of voting for Pocock clearly doesn't apply in the ACT election, the candidate's close links to Pocock cannot hurt.  A Pocock-backed independent even won a single seat race in the Northern Territory, after all!

I4C appear to have vetted well thus far, with relatively few signs of the candidate implosions that often blight fourth parties.  The nearest thing so far has been Brindabella candidate Vanessa Picker saying that she would not support retaining Andrew Barr personally as Chief Minister.  This was in contrast to the party line that "We will follow our shared principles in seeking agreement on whom to support as chief minister".

In looking at I4C chances elsewhere it is worth being a little cautious about how strongly their vote will flow within the ticket; high primaries on the night will not necessarily convert to seats if the vote is not well concentrated with lead candidates (a problem that has ailed the Belco Party in the past, and also fourth parties in Tasmania).  But anywhere one looks at the 2020 results there are juicy partial quotas floating around to suggest that if I4C is even a modest success there will be seats it can win.  Absent of polling I have no robust idea how strong its chances are or which I4C candidates should be taken especially seriously.  However they are running the biggest fourth party campaign and I would not discount that they could win multiple seats.  But neither do I take it for granted that they will get anything at all.

Carrick is probably the next most talked about fourth party chance, though she has a pretty serious run as a 2020 baseline and has to improve on that or have the Greens go backwards quite a lot to win.  The Ginninderra situation with the departure of Kikkert potentially opening the door to the Belco Party's Bill Stefaniak or even Kikkert as an FF candidate (especially with the Liberals running only four candidates) is also interesting.  There isn't much buzz about the other minor parties.  

I have however had some reports that Belco are not that visible on the ground in Ginninderra and just seem to be going through the motions, while others think Stefaniak is a serious contender.  An interesting I4C lead candidate here is Mark Richardson, a serving police officer who is very high profile, eg after calling car hoons a "sub-species of the human race".  That pits him against Belco which historically is the pro-Summernats party.  

A common comment (a good indictment of it all by Jasper Lindell here) has been that the Canberra Liberals are still messy - they never seem able to reconcile fights between conservatives and moderates or to avoid having candidate disasters during the election.  In Ginninderra not only did they disendorse Kikkert - citing alleged disclosure irregularities and workplace culture problems - but also Darren Roberts, who is still on the ballot, ran into Facebook trouble.  A reader has also reminded me that the federal Liberals have a curious approach to making federal drag work for their team-mates, and in this term have continued (from opposition) to move a range of motions seeking to exploit the ACT's status as a non-state by overriding its legislation.

The Greens may have bitten off more than they could chew with their spectacular six-seat result in 2020, and now they have to chew like hell to keep them all or nearly so.  On paper three of their seats are highly marginal even ignoring the fourth-party threat; two of the others are somewhat loseable despite the substantial margins they were won by in 2020.   It should be noted that the Greens run corflute-free campaigns in the ACT, which obviously did them no harm whatsoever last time.  It is worth bearing in mind that in Kurrajong especially one party that would have deflated the Greens' primary last time (Canberra Progressives) is not running, and this could boost the Green vote in any competition with I4C or others.  

There has been a lot of attention on ballot order.  My experience is that ballot position in Hare-Clark is not very important; the places that use Hare-Clark are electorally literate and donkey voting tends to be low (it's not as much fun across the page.)  There is a case in Bass, Tasmania 2014 where it is known that the donkey vote in Bass (1-2-3 etc across the page in all forms combined) was at most 0.24% but probably below 0.2%, and the Australian Christians candidate polled 1.05% despite drawing pole position.  I just don't think that it matters.  

It is very hard, even with no polling, to see the Liberals getting anywhere near a majority, or even a combined majority for candidates who are clearly of the right.  It seems unlikely Labor would get one either especially given federal drag- there is in theory a path but they would need some swing to them and the Greens and I4C to poll poorly.  The big question here is how dissatisfied with the big three are voters really.  We have seen claims in at least the last few elections that voters were ready to pull the pin on them, but those claims came up short as fourth-party votes scattered among the ACT's riffraff of backyard parties such that none of those could win as votes exhausted.  This time seems a much more serious attack.  Assuming there is no majority, which of the following will we see:

* another Labor/Liberal/Greens shutout as has occurred every election from 2004?

* one or more non-big-three candidates elected, but the Greens retain sole balance of power?

* a Tasmania-style rainbow result where no party holds the sole balance of power and the largest major party has multiple paths to government?

* something even messier?

I should note that in Tasmania, the result was fuelled by the return to 35 seats (7 per division), but it would to some extent have happened under the 25-seat system anyway.  Having 5 seats per division makes life harder for fourth party challengers, but not impossible.  

Anyway I hope we get some actual polling in the next few weeks; going a whole election cycle without it isn't good enough.  I may add some notes to this article later, failing which I will be here for live and postcount coverage (but this year split into two threads); here's the 2020 thread as a taster for what you will get.  

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Why I've Quit Doing Paid Election Coverage For The Mercury

Between 2013 and 2024 I covered four state and four federal elections via live blogging for The Mercury on contract on election night, as well as writing several commissioned articles in the leadup to various elections.  I enjoyed providing this coverage and working with The Mercury's reporters and staff on election nights tremendously.  I think The Mercury in general serves the population of Hobart well, as a rare example of a Murdoch tabloid that is not particularly slanted, and that the paper provides a lot of good coverage of local political matters.  I have high regard for several journalists who work there.  In general my relationship with The Mercury in this time has been excellent, albeit slightly strained at some state election times by some polling coverage issues (lack of transparency and detail around secretive local industry polls and passing off reader surveys as polls, for example).  One doesn't expect to have everything.  

However I have decided to end this association because the Mercury's online subscription system, and customer relations in the event of failure of that system, are so dreadful that I will not work for a company that continues to rip off its customers in this way.   I will think about options for future Tasmanian state and federal election night coverage, but probably not now, as I am very busy for the next few weeks.  It's sad to have had to move on from work I and many readers enjoyed in such disappointing circumstances, but it's time to do something else with my Tasmanian and federal election nights, whatever that may be.  

Crying Wolf: More Embarrassingly Bad Tabloid Poll Reporting

 "Anthony Albanese could be on track to being a one-term Prime Minister, with a new poll showing Labor's primary vote crashing in three major states.  The federal government is in serious trouble in the eastern states - where most of the seats are - with Labor down to 24 per cent in Queensland, 28 in Victoria and 32 in NSW."

"Labor’s primary vote has crashed to just 24 per cent in Queensland, 28 per cent in Victoria and 32 per cent in New South Wales, the wolf + smith shows.  But Labor is dominant in South Australia, where its primary vote is 41 per cent, and 60 per cent on a two-party-preferred basis.  The poll – which measured both state and federal voting intention – suggests the government is in dire trouble in the eastern states, with just 43 per cent of the two-party-preferred vote in Queensland and 48 per cent in Victoria."

This is how the Daily Mail and the Murdoch tabloids (Courier Mail/Daily Telegraph etc) respectively wrote up a massive new poll by an initially mysterious outlet wolf + smith.  But this was in fact another example of laughably incompetent poll reporting from these outlets, one that again happened to be in service of the narrative their right-wing readers would want to see.  What the poll in fact found is very different.  The state-level figures these outlets were commenting were state voting intention not federal.  This was made so abundantly clear in the poll report that, among other subtle hints, the whole of page 10 of the poll report is devoted to making it clear that the rest of the report is state not federal.

Poll Roundup: 50.5 Is The New 51

2PP Aggregate 50.6 to ALP (-0.1 since end of last week)
Aggregate has changed little since loss of about half a point in mid-July
Election "held now" would probably produce minority Labor government

I haven't done a federal poll roundup for a while and today is a randomly opportune time to do one following the second straight 50-50 Newspoll and mention some general themes in recent 2PP polling.  In the last week we have had:

* Newspoll at 50-50 (ALP 32 L-NP 38 Green 12 ON 7 others 11)

* Redbridge at 50.5-49.5 to ALP (ALP 32 L-NP 38 and the rest not published yet, but I'm expecting Greens either 10 or 11)

* YouGov at 50-50 (ALP 32 L-NP 37 Green 13 ON 8 others 10) (Note: normally the 2PP for these primaries would be 51-49 to Labor, though it is possible to get 50 from these primaries sometimes because of rounding and perhaps also the makeup of others.).  

* Essential at 48-46 to ALP, equivalent to 51.1-48.9 (raw primaries ALP 29 Coalition 33 Greens 13 ON 7 UAP 1 others 11 undecided 6 - meaning the major party primaries are effectively more like 31-35)

* Morgan at 50.5-49.5 to Coalition by respondent preferences (50-50 last election) (ALP 29.5 L-NP 39.5 Green 13 ON 4 IND 9 others 5 - Morgan has a standalone IND option on the ballot everywhere, which is likely to be overstated)

Supporting First Past The Post For Australia Is Pointless

Lately I've been seeing a lot of social media griping about the current government and/or the Greens and teals, mostly from alternative right-wing accounts, in which the writer attacks the Government and says it was only elected because of preferential voting, and we should get rid of preferences by switching to first past the post.   I don't think there is much significant advocacy for first-past-the-post in Australia though Brisbane Lord Mayor Adrian Schrinner has unfortunately supported it (what, optional preferences is not enough for him?), as has Resolve pollster Jim Reed in 2022, and a steady flow of petitions to the Commonwealth Parliament generally with tiny signature numbers.  

The following alone is sufficient reason to dismiss all such calls: First past the post is a discriminatory system that violates the Australian value of a fair go.  Under first past the post, a voter whose most preferred party or candidate is unpopular must make a strategic decision between voting for someone who is not in fact their first preference and effectively throwing away their vote.  However a voter who is pretty sure their most preferred candidate will finish first or second does not have to face that strategic dilemma.  On this basis, having first past the post, in a country able to afford and count a fairer system, is not treating all electors fairly.   I do not think there is actually any valid excuse for keeping single-member first past the post anywhere (though the transition out of it needs to be carefully managed in those places that do have it) but this article is confined to the argument re Australia.  

Australia has a proud tradition of fair voting that started over 100 years ago when preferences were introduced to stop conservative parties from losing conservative electorates when voters were split between two different conservative candidates.  The famous case is the 1918 Swan by-election, but in fact the Hughes Government was working to introduced preferential voting months before it occurred but the legislation had not yet passed the parliament.   When I see supposed patriots with Australian flags in their social media profiles propose that we junk this fine tradition and replace it with unfair and primitive crud voting systems used overseas, I can only shake my head at their claims that they really love this country.   I am not going to let these people get away with it; to paraphrase a slightly different Doctor, this voting system is defended.  

Similar to my polling disinformation register, I've written this article mainly as a labor-saving device so that I don't have to keep making the same long replies on the same points but can simply say "see point 3 here" with a link.  I hope others find it interesting and useful, and more points may be added.

I should note that this article also applies to many criticisms of compulsory preferences made by supporters of optional preferencing - especially part 7.