2016 Tasmania Senate: A Model Of What Might Occur

Button press imminent - results and discussion will be posted on a new thread.  Thanks all for the comments - this has been the most commented thread in this site's history by a long way!

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Tasmanian Senate model

Outcome of model based on current data: 
Likely outcome 5 Labor 4 Liberal 2 Green 1 Lambie
Next most likely outcome is 5-5-1-1.
Nick McKim and Richard Colbeck main contenders for final seat. McKim appears somewhat better placed on my sampling but contest is too close to call.
Significant chance of Colbeck not making final two and final contest being McKim vs McCulloch

Outside chance of McCulloch (One Nation) win, other micro-parties don't appear competitive.

Note: updates added through count including second model run from Thursday 21 July  - scroll to bottom.

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(Original introduction - see updates below)

Labor's Catryna Bilyk and Lisa Singh are likely to be re-elected to the Senate while Richard Colbeck is struggling to beat his ticketmate David Bushby or the Greens' Nick McKim for one of the final two seats.  We probably won't know who will win for sure until all the votes are entered and "the button" is pressed.

These are the provisional findings of my first attempt to model the Senate race using actual scrutineering data as well as current estimates of the vote totals.  There are many uncertain points in the model which can be refined with further sampling if anyone has the time to do it (I'm not really sure that I do), but I post this as a first attempt.  I warn that it is predictably wonky (again about 4/5 on the Wonk Factor scale).

For more background to this count see my original Tasmania Senate postcount thread.

Most of the text below is the original text of this article written on Tuesday 12th, when Richard Colbeck's position was somewhat better than now.

Tracking the count

Tracking the Senate count has been extremely difficult because of the nature of booth information available.  Votes counted on the night (or in post-counting) are initially recorded as "unapportioned" (meaning that they could be either above or below the line) and later segregated out as above-the-line "ticket votes" for parties and below-the-line votes for candidates.  However some booths temporarily appear in the results in a partly separated-out form, so that the ticket votes for the candidates are shown but the below-the-line votes are not split up by candidate.  As a result, it is necessary to check which booths at any given time have all the below-the-line votes split out to particular candidates.

The leading parties in the overall state count at the moment are:

Labor 4.442 quotas

Liberal 4.217 quotas

Green 1.412 quotas

Jacqui Lambie Network 1.081 quotas

A quota is 1/13th of the total vote (plus one vote then rounded down).  There may still be significant shifts in these votes as more votes are included.  In particular, postal votes - of which only a few thousand have been counted - should slightly improve the Liberals' position.

Large below-the-line votes for Labor's Lisa Singh and Liberal Richard Colbeck mean that the race for the final spots is about candidates not just parties.  As noted on the original thread, I currently project Singh to receive 0.77 quotas (5.9%) statewide, and Colbeck to receive 0.63 quotas (4.88%).  (Tally Room has slightly lower figures for both, but I believe those are statewide totals, not projections weighted by electorate).  These numbers are dependent on the selection of booths included in the count and are likely to move about in the post-count, but I'll go with them for now.

When the preference distribution starts, the top three Labor and Liberal candidates, the Greens' Peter Whish-Wilson, and on current numbers Jacqui Lambie, will all be elected either on primaries or on the cascading surpluses arising from the election of the top ALP and Liberal candidates.  (It's actually not at all clear which of Anne Urquhart (ALP) and Eric Abetz (Liberal) will be elected first, but it is purely of academic interest).  It's possible Lambie will fall short of a quota in her own right, but if so she will be elected quickly anyway.

With eight candidates elected, the remaining incumbent Senators (Bilyk, Singh, Bushby, Colbeck and McKim) have a small problem - five into four doesn't go, so someone is going to lose.   It might seem that it is just a matter of subtracting the quota totals for Singh and Colbeck from their party totals to see what Bilyk and Bushby will have left over, and on that basis that Bilyk and Bushby are in clover.  After all they start roughly level with Singh and Colbeck, but they have access to above-the-line preferences from other parties, while Singh and Colbeck can only get below-the-lines.  However there's an important complication:

Within-ticket leakage

Some votes within each major party's haul are below-the-line votes for candidates other than Singh and Colbeck.  For example my tracking has Eric Abetz on target for a below-the-line vote of 2.35% statewide.  Many of these below-the-lines go straight down the Liberal ticket, for reasons including:

* the voter wants to re-order candidates from another party they have preferenced, but not within the Liberal ticket

* the voter wants to use their 12 below-the-line votes to just preference four parties instead of six while complying with the instructions

However, some do not, and 1 Abetz 2 Colbeck votes are relatively common (so far I have found about 20% to be like this).  This makes sense since Abetz and Colbeck are very high-profile (a former Government Leader in the Senate and a current Minister, respectively) while Bushby, Parry and Duniam are not nearly so well known. With below-the-line votes close to 10% of Abetz's total, having 2% of his 2.4-quota surplus "leak" to Colbeck is no small matter.

Similarly there is some flow from Anne Urquhart to Lisa Singh (although most Urquhart BTLs are straight down the ticket, and Urquhart has fewer of them than Abetz).  Then there are voters who have voted 1 for a major party candidate who is not top of the ticket, but whose preferences will be distributed early in the count (Polley, Brown or Short for Labor; Parry, Duniam and Tucker for the Liberals).  These preferences are much less likely to follow the ticket in choosing between Bilyk and Singh on the one hand and Bushby and Colbeck on the other. From what I've seen so far, those splits aren't far from even.

There are also some outright leaks from the party tickets to other parties.  Taking all the within ticket-leaks into account (on some of them I have very limited data) Singh might have about 0.825 quotas, Colbeck 0.748, Bilyk 0.600, Bushby 0.430 and McKim 0.422 (picking up the odd leak from the majors).  This is just an artificial starting point once all other major party candidates are eliminated or excluded, although in fact some micro-parties will be cut out before Short and Tucker.

Then there are a pack of micro-party preferences, which look something like this:

This chart gives the approximate percentage of the overall votes, the portion of a quota, the quota portion split between above and below the line, and the percentage of votes that are below the line for each group.

The preferences of these micro-parties with a combined 15% will largely determine the election once the major party primaries are clear and leakage against the ticket orders processed.

Estimating preference flow

Over the past several days I have sampled the preference flow of 327 micro-party voters, including 58 below-the-line votes. There have also been many other votes I've watched without recording full sample data. BTL votes for micro-parties are rarely seen and difficult to follow on the screen, and JLN is the only micro-party for which I caught any real number of them.  The votes sampled come from electorates around the state, but are not necessarily an even or reliable mix.  

Initially I thought that four micro-parties should be considered in contention for a seat as well: One Nation, Family First, Shooters Fishers and Farmers, and Nick Xenophon Team.  These are the four highest polling micro-parties and also they would seem to have more chance based on the right-wing lean of the micro-parties generally (compared to the left-wing Sex Party).

The preference flows seen support something I had been saying all along in the Senate reform debate: micro-party voters do not just preference other micro-parties; many micro-party votes go to the "big three" (Labor, Liberal, Green).  The fact that micro-parties with really trivial vote shares (well below 1%) cannot win in the new system has little to do with some votes exhausting and everything to do with the fact that all preferences splatter.  The preference flows between any party and any other are too weak for any party starting from a very small share of votes to work its way through the field to victory, and this would be the case even if no votes exhausted.  The strongest preference flow I saw from any more than a handful of votes was 50% from Shooters Fishers and Farmers to One Nation.  

There are some very surprising preferences too.  In the first minutes of my main sample I saw a vote 1 Sex Party 2 Family First, even though these two parties are so strongly opposed to each other that the Sex Party is often seen as a deliberately anti-FF party.  Not too long after I saw the reverse and by the end of the day I had seen six votes with these two as the top two parties.  I tried to think of the most illogical 1-2 vote that could possibly exist and decided that 1 Shooters Fishers and Farmers 2 Animal Justice Party would be quite bizarre since the AJP believe that all of shooting, fishing and animal farming should be either banned immediately or at least phased out over time.  Within ten minutes I had seen such a vote, and later I saw the same thing the other way round.  

The following are some general themes I've picked up from these rather small samples and general vote-watching so far:

* Hardly any micro-party voters follow their party's how-to-vote cards.  Hooray!

* Virtually no-one votes for just one party above the line.  In thousands of votes I've watched I've seen three just-1s for the Liberals, two for Labor and one for the Animal Justice Party.  I've also seen one vote for just two parties.

* Lambie Network above-the-line voters often preference One Nation, but Lambie Network below-the-line voters more heavily preference prominent major party candidates.

* None of the left-wing micros that could have served as preference feeders for the Greens under the old system (Animal Justice, Renewable Energy, Sex Party perhaps, Science, Flux) reliably preference them when it is a matter of voter choice.  Voters for such micros may be nearly as likely to preference Labor.

* NXT voters mainly preference the "big three" rather than the right-wing micros.

* Religious right parties mainly preference each other and the majors.  There's only a small flow to SFF and One Nation.  

* The Family First vote has a large semi-donkey component. Quite often voters have picked six parties including FF and then put those six in the order they appear across the page.  This among other things seems to lead to quite a high FF to Labor flow. Let's not have a double dissolution in the future without a serious look at some basic ballot paper rotation first, thanks. 

(Any of the above impressions might be wrong based on the small sample sizes involved, but none of it is all that surprising.)

I used the data collected to do a mock preference distribution on the assumption that all micros other than the top four would be uncompetitive. The small sample sizes are such that there will always be zero preference flows and other such nonsense in the model, but again, these should on the whole cancel out.

The following (numbers in quotas) are the final stages of this crude mock-up of the election.

At the above point in the simulation Colbeck is narrowly eliminated and the election stops with McKim and Bushby elected short of quota.  But that does not mean this will necessarily happen! In particular, if the Liberal vote lifts further in post-counting, McKim may fall behind in the projection.

Some comments:

* SF+F might get over NXT but it doesn't seem to matter because they do not get enough preferences from either NXT or Family First to put them near One Nation.  Their problems include that the helpful Lambie Network ATL surplus is so small and that One Nation, a potential rich source of preferences, is too far ahead.

* NXT also just can't catch the party ahead of them.  Family First have strong flows from the Christian Democrats and similar flows to NXT from other micros generally.

* Family First might beat One Nation, but their flow from One Nation is weak, so I would not expect it to change the outcome if they did.

* It is possible given the various potential errors in the estimates that one of Bushby, McKim or Colbeck would be actually excluded before Kate McCulloch.  If this happens, McCulloch probably still wouldn't win, but she would still have a chance, if a distinctly long-shot one.  Probably she would rely on performing well compared to the model and having two of the above perform really badly relative to it, then having so many of the first beaten candidate's preferences exhaust that she beat both McKim and one of the Liberals.

* The final model outcome is very much too close to rely on.  In this run McKim and Bushby win and Colbeck misses out, but even changing the right 2-3 votes in the original sampling could cause Colbeck to win.  (Furthermore the flows from Singh to the remaining candidates at the end are just guesstimates since I haven't sampled that question much - but note that if Singh quotas after Bilyk, then Singh's surplus is swamped by Urquhart preferences and so all the 1 Singh 2 Colbeck BTL votes will count for little.  This is a result of the repulsive Inclusive Gregory system for surplus transfers, in case you were wondering.)

* Both Labor Senators crossed quota rather easily in this mockup.  Generally I found that Labor was getting stronger or as strong preference flows from nearly all parties than the Liberals or Greens were, which is not surprising in the context of the overall election result and the Singh factor.  However it is still possible for the current statewide projected totals to shift, or for the model to have errors based on the relatively small preferencing samples, such that either might still lose.  

I hope this model serves as a useful base for speculation about this contest, and if I learn more about some of the preference flows it can be further refined and rerun with a larger sample.  Meanwhile I do have to spend some time on other work!

Update: Thursday 14 July.  A large volume of Senate votes have just been uploaded.  Based only on the booth counts (not the postals, absents and declaration prepolls) David Barry has Singh on 3.2% of 29503 in Bass, 2.7% of 5827 in Braddon, 11.4% of 19536 in Denison, 8.7% of 10929 in Franklin, 4% of 20688 in Lyons, for a projected state total of 6.01% (0.782 quotas).  Colbeck is on 3.1%, 8.1%, 2.9%, 4.4% and 3.6% for a projected state total of 4.41% (0.573 quotas).  That is a gain of .01 quotas for Singh on the figures in my model, and a loss of .06 quotas for Colbeck.  However Colbeck's vote might be reasonably adjusted upwards, say to 0.58 quotas, to account for the Liberals' superior performance in post-counting.

(Note that the AEC totals which imply much lower below-the-line vote rates are not reliable because some booths and some vote categories are being sorted only as Ticket Votes vs Unapportioned, with below-the-line votes not separated out.  David Barry is running an automated version of the manual sorting of fully counted and partly counted booths that has been taking me hours every time a new set of figures comes out.  It's the same method I was using, except with much less potential for errors!)

It is difficult to know what is going on with the postal votes, which have been at least partly sorted into above the line and ticket votes in some divisions, because the rates of below-the-line voting in the postal votes appear to be massively lower than in the booth votes.  For this reason I believe it is only possible to use the booth totals at the moment in estimating the Singh and Colbeck votes.  If there is a real difference in below-the-line votes in postal voting this would make Colbeck's position more difficult, and McKim's easier.

There have also been shifts in the overall total with the Liberals up slightly to 4.23 quotas and Labor down to 4.40.

Using the new booth figures as a base for the model, the results at the end would become something like .92 quotas for Bushby and .75 quotas for Colbeck.  This means that with these revised figures the model now predicts 5-4-2-1 with Bushby defeating Colbeck for the fourth Liberal seat as the most likely outcome.  However more sampling is needed on the preference flows to the Greens from minor parties, and Labor vs Liberal from One Nation, especially to be more confident that this will be the case.

Update Friday: Again thanks to David Barry (and a free plug for his election statistics website which has all kinds of excellent goodies on it).  There is a further improvement in Singh's position and a further decline in Colbeck's.  In ordinary (booth) voting Singh is now on 3.3% of 32634 in Bass, 2.7% of 9061 Braddon, 11.7% of 23829 Denison, 9.1% of 14314 Franklin and 3.9% of 23287 Lyons, for a statewide average of 6.14% (0.8 quotas).  Colbeck is on 3.2%, 7.0%, 3.0%, 4.5% and 3.5% by electorate for a statewide average of 4.23% (0.55 quotas).  The problem for Colbeck is that his vote has been declining with more counting in the one electorate he is strong in, while Singh is strong in two electorates.

It will be interesting to see what happens with Singh's vote in the rest of Denison.  So far she has done exceptionally well in the left-wing inner-city and bush-fringe booths that the Greens usually dominate, but struggled to break 10% in the Glenorchy booths. There are two types of booths we have not seen action from yet and they are the North Hobart area (which has a fairly high Labor vote but not so many Green votes to plunder) and the Sandy Bay area (a Liberal enclave). Her vote might go down a little once these are included.

Further Colbeck/Singh Projection (Saturday):  I thought it might be interesting to try projecting the final ordinary booth votes for Singh and Colbeck on the assumption that their share of their party's below-the-line vote remains the same in each electorate through the rest of the count as it has done so far.  This method projects Singh's final ordinary booth vote to fall very slightly to 6.03% (0.78 quotas) but Colbeck's to fall significantly to 3.91% (0.48 quotas).  The major issue for Colbeck in this projection is that it seems the very early booths counted in Braddon were unrepresentative and the projection suggests he will continue to go backwards there, to about 5.5% of ordinary votes.  He would need to score a higher percentage of the Braddon Liberal BTL vote to beat this projection than has happened so far.   This projection seems to add more to the evidence that Colbeck is in a difficult position.

On the assumption that Colbeck is not beating Bushby, he beats McKim if the preference flow to the Liberals from micro-parties generally is much stronger (or that to the Greens much weaker) than in my sampling.  This is still a realistic chance given the small size of the sample.  If this were the case, Bushby would be put over quota earlier in the count, allowing all ATL votes reaching the Liberal ticket to go to Colbeck and allowing him to beat McKim.

However that would be a straight race between the Green and Liberal tickets in which the Liberal ticket must beat the Green ticket by (on current figures) .1806 quotas out of 1.881 quotas (a gain rate of .096 votes/vote).  This in a contest in which the Liberals are more exposed to BTL leakage out of their ticket than the Greens, and in which votes are exhausting in significant numbers, and votes are being soaked up by Labor, and also some of the parties will break much more to the Greens than Liberals.

The other complication here is that there's now a much more serious chance that Colbeck leaves the count before McCulloch.  That ticks one of the boxes for One Nation to win (the other two being that they do much better on preferences than expected and McKim does much worse).  So the chance of a One Nation upset, while still apparently low, is higher than it looked a few days ago.

Update Monday 18th: 

Revised figures for actually processed booths posted by David Barry show Singh on 6.2% (.806 quotas) based on actual counted totals from 154/310 booths (Bass 3.2 Braddon 2.5 Denison 11.7 Franklin 9.6 Lyons 3.9).  The main difference with my projection above is that it expected Singh to finish on 8.7% of ordinary votes in Franklin; after the new data this has increased to 8.9%.

Colbeck has continued to fall significantly in Braddon as expected and is now on 4.11% of the counted ordinary votes (.534 quotas) in counted booths (3.2, 6.3, 2.9, 4.6, 3.5). My projection for him to fall to 5.5% of ordinary Braddon votes has not changed.

The other news is that Labor's total has come down to 4.38 quotas since I started this article, with the Liberals up to 4.24.  In my sample, Labor was doing much better than the Liberals on micro-party preferences, and on that basis I'm projecting their ticket lead over the Liberals to increase to about 0.35 quotas at the point at which Family First have been excluded.  But even if my sample is rubbish and the Liberals are actually doing much better than Labor, this would place Bilyk at risk rather than Singh.

I've also noticed that while Singh performs slightly worse as a share of Labor's BTL postals than as a share of Labor's BTL ordinaries, it's not by much.  So unless it turns out that the proportion of Labor voters who vote BTL in the postcount is very much lower than those who do so in ordinary votes, it's getting hard to find a way that Singh could lose.

Monday 8 pm: Figures are now up to 181 booths and there has been not much change, mainly because not much more has been counted in Braddon.

Wednesday 1:30 pm: Further revised ordinary booth figures show not much has changed: Singh on 6.17% and Colbeck on 4.14%.  Colbeck had improved substantially in Denison (he polled 16.6% at Sandy Bay Beach, a Liberal stronghold) and I now project him to improve to 4% of ordinary booth votes in Denison, which means he probably won't fall below 4% statewide as earlier projected.

The other interesting thing is that as postal votes have filled out, we can see that the BTL candidates are doing well on postal votes in Denison and Franklin.  In Denison Singh has 12% of postals, which is exactly what she is getting in booth votes, and Colbeck has 4.2%, which is slightly more than he is getting in booth votes.  In Franklin Singh has 8.7% of postals, slightly below her booth vote, and Colbeck has 4.4%, slightly above his booth vote.  The suggestion is that once postals fill out for all electorates Colbeck's vote will improve slightly while Singh's will not decline much.  So there is more confidence that the booth votes are a good guide to where these two will finish up in the primary count.

Thursday 1 pm: A big upload for Braddon and as projected Colbeck has dropped back to 5.5% there and is now barely above 4% of ordinary votes.  However Singh continues to rise and is now on 6.23% with a new best booth of 20% at Mt Stuart.  I am doing more scrutineering today but if anyone has a scenario for how Singh can realistically lose from here I would be interested to see it, 'cause I don't.

Thursday 4 pm: I will post a new projection overnight.  In my sample so far today I am probably seeing slightly more positive signs for Colbeck and also McCulloch but whether it's enough to shift the picture will have to wait til I process the full sample.

Thursday 21 July: Model Second Run Based On More Data

I have done another day of scrutineering and beefed my sample of micro-party votes up to a total of 534 above-the-lines and 173 below-the-lines.  I have also looked at leakage in the Greens ticket.

The button press is expected around Tuesday or Wednesday next week and I don't believe we can be super-confident about the last seat until it happens.

The following are my general comments:

* The data entry staff are just astonishingly fast.  It was tough enough even for someone with my ferocious speed and good eyesight to keep up with them early on in the process but they have slightly more than doubled their average speed since the count began and have a graph on the wall to prove it! There is always the possibility that a preference sample like mine contains biases based on which votes are easiest to read data from before it disappears off the screen!

* Today's sample showed better preference flows to both the Liberals and One Nation than the previous sample, and weaker flows to the Greens.  Especially the flow to the Greens was weaker from the Sex Party/HEMP ticket than I earlier had it.

* The preference flow from micro parties to Labor continues to be strong.  Normally I would expect a lot of these micros to preference the Liberals more than Labor, but in the context of a 56-44ish 2PP drubbing at Reps level in the state, it seems that quite a few right-wing voters exhausted their preferences rather than preference the Liberals.

* Today's sample showed a stronger BTL "leak" to Richard Colbeck from Eric Abetz, pushing my estimate of the share of Abetz votes that reach Colbeck ahead of Bushby up to almost 30%.

* About 11% of Greens BTLs leave the ticket instead of going to McKim.  There are no prizes for guessing who gets most of the escapees.

* When a micro-party BTL reached the major parties, I originally had Singh getting 69% of the Labor ones and Colbeck 41% of the Liberals.  But after today I'm seeing more that just hit a major ticket and go down the line, so these numbers are down to 56% and 32% respectively.

* Sex Party-Family First, Family First-Sex Party.  Aaargh! I have now seen this stupid "vote for whatever micro-parties you have heard of" vote ten times, and saw a few more Animal Justice/SF+F votes today too.

Here's the closing stages of my revised preference distribution model:

In this model Singh picks up about .04 of a quota off BTLs within the Labor ticket and leaks from the Liberal and Green tickets and by the start point of the above already has enough votes to be safe.  ATL preference flows from the micro-parties to the Liberal and Labor tickets ensure the election of Bilyk and Bushby.  The micro-parties other than One Nation all again do not get anywhere.

The crunch point comes after the expected exclusion of Family First when someone (probably Colbeck or McCulloch, with an outside chance of McKim if the Greens' preference flows are much worse than my model) is excluded.  In the model it is McCulloch, and her preferences go all over the place with a lot exhausting and create a cascade of surpluses, leading to the end result where McKim defeats Colbeck by a modest margin.  However it could almost as easily be Colbeck who is excluded at this point.

If Colbeck is excluded, Bushby gets a large surplus dominated by Liberal ticket votes which then puts Bilyk over quota, and Bilyk's surplus puts Singh over quota.  This creates a Singh surplus which by value consists mostly of Labor ticket votes (Inclusive Gregory strikes again!), which will flow to McKim more strongly than McCulloch and would presumably ensure McKim wins.

If McKim is knocked out before either McCulloch or Colbeck (which on my sampling is rather unlikely) then that also creates Labor surpluses dominated by Labor and to a lesser extent Green votes which presumably (but I haven't checked yet) help Colbeck more than McCulloch - this seems to be McCulloch's best chance, though it seems rather unlikely McKim does quite badly enough to be behind both at the key point.

If my sample (and sampling) is representative then despite the fairly close margins the level of doubt about the result is not that high.  However even though it now includes preferences taken in three different sessions, it's still always possible the real preferences could be markedly different.  For this reason the Greens should not be that confident yet, and Colbeck still has a realistic chance.

Monday 25 July 12:30 pm: Primary booth figures are almost done and dusted with only a few booths in Lyons missing and we have Singh on 6.25% from ordinary booths and Colbeck on 4.00%. In all the primary count (including informals) has now reached 94.05% of enrolment and there must be very few votes left to add to the primary tally indeed, but 676 booth BTL votes are yet to be apportioned and there may be more postcount BTLs to be tidied up as well.  Singh and Colbeck are currently up to 6.09% and 3.94% in the overall totals so should go very close to matching their booth votes when all votes are included.

The significant development is in the totals with the Greens up from 1.427 quotas when I did the projection above to 1.45 quotas and the Liberals down from 4.234 to 4.228, a net improvement of 0.029 of a quota in McKim's position relative to the Liberals, which is far from meaningless in the context of a projection that had McKim's final margin at .110 of a quota.  The main reason for this is that the way the postcount votes are folded out causes below-the-lines to come in late, resulting in an increased vote for parties with high BTL rates.  Labor are down from 4.381 quotas to 4.361.  One Nation have also dropped back slightly from .337 to .334.  Because of changes in Colbeck's personal vote it is now still even closer as to whether or not he is excluded before One Nation (if he stays at 4.00% my projection still has him a whisker ahead, but not if his final total is a bit lower.)

If Colbeck is cut we're looking at about 0.58 of a quota of Liberal votes to be thrown with Singh on about 0.927 of a quota, Bilyk on about 0.88, McKim on about 0.78 and McCulloch on about 0.634 (according to my sampling).  Anything from Colbeck that doesn't flow to Bushby (including the substantial number of 1 Colbeck 2 Singh BTLs) would leak at full value.  Although on my observation Labor was getting more Liberal ATLs than either the Greens or One Nation, there should be enough exhaust that any Bilyk/Singh surplus won't now be very large.  It seems highly unlikely One Nation would catch the Greens at 0.24 votes/vote on Liberal preferences with votes also exhausting and going to Labor, especially on what I have seen of Liberal votes going all over the place.  But if One Nation are actually doing much better on preferences than my sampling shows, or the Greens much worse, then they would have some sort of chance.

Tuesday 12:30 pm: There are now no unapportioned votes showing, with Singh currently on 6.12% and Colbeck on 3.97%.  It is notable that both these candidates have performed less well on out-of-electorate prepolls, absents and provisional votes as compared to booth votes and postals, so it may be there are still some votes to add for them in these categories, which would cause their tallies to still increase slightly.  The AEC are now expecting the button press towards the end of the week according to the ABC.

Tuesday 5:50 pm: The Mercury now reports the count could be finalised tomorrow.

I should comment briefly on the argument made by Jody Fassina in that piece and elsewhere, which is that Colbeck starts ahead of McKim and has a greater pool of right-wing votes available to him.  What that argument misses is that the fourth Liberal David Bushby will start a long way short of quota, and until Bushby crosses quota, Colbeck does not get a single above-the-line preference from anywhere, while McKim does get above-the-line preferences (as well as below-the-lines) and will gain votes over Colbeck at just about every micro-party exclusion.  This is why the Liberals actually need a much greater share of micro-party preferences to go to them than go to the Greens (or for the Greens to get hardly any micro-party preferences at all), if Colbeck is to win.  That could happen, (and indeed my projection does show Colbeck closing about half the gap on ticket votes) but it is not as easy as the argument suggests.

Tuesday 10:00 pm: Unconfirmed but I've heard on the grapevine that the button press is tomorrow afternoon. On the assumption that the figures are final (with Singh and Colbeck as above), I've entered revised estimates for the main contenders into my model.  It now (by a tiny margin which I place approximately no trust in) has Colbeck excluded before One Nation. If Colbeck outlasts One Nation, it expects McKim to beat him by about .14 of a quota (though the usual caution about possible errors in my preference sampling applies.).  If he doesn't, we enter the unsampled world of whether Liberal voters prefer One Nation to the Greens enough to put McCulloch in (I rather doubt it).

Button press imminent - results and discussion will be posted on a new thread.