Election Night Arrangements and Election Watching Tips (2022)

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My coverage tonight and to come

I will be doing live blogging for the Mercury from c. 6:30 pm.  The link to the live coverage is here, together with a link to the tweet linking to it.  I am not sure yet how long the coverage will go or whether I will need to take any breaks to write articles.  I may also pop up on Twitter during quiet moments (@kevinbonham) but this is not guaranteed.  The format of the blogging is not known to me yet and may be 

I will probably not be checking emails, tweets or for comments on this site regularly during this time, and I ask journalists not from the Mercury not to call me until the live blog has finished.  However if you have interesting scrutineering samples from Tasmania - especially of the rate of below-the-line voting for Eric Abetz in a Senate booth (please say which booth!) - you're extremely welcome to SMS them to me (0421428775) or email them to me (k_bonham@iinet.net.au).  I probably won't be able to reply immediately.

The live blog is paywalled and I don't know if there will be a paywall free link or not. Subscription options are available.  

Once the live blog has finished I will go home and, after a break, late night coverage will continue on this site for as long as I can manage it.  Postcount threads will be unrolled overnight or tomorrow through the day in order of interest to me, with a special focus on messy three-cornered seats and a single thread for the vanilla postcount seats.

For booth data, keep an eye on Pollbludger.  If the PB booth feed works, it will be far better than anything else out there and I will make heavy use of it.  

When will we know?

I do not know if there will be exit polling.  The YouGov exit poll last election gained a reputation as part of the polling failure, but seems to have been on-the-day votes only and not too bad as a measure of those.  The difficulties with exit polling an election like this with increasing pre-day voting are so severe that I would treat all exit polls with massive caution, especially those with an obviously street-poll feel. 

Votes will build up from maybe 6:30 and if the result isn't close we could know who has won the Reps within a couple of hours.  But if it is close we will be hanging on prepolls late at night (unfinished prepolls stop at midnight).  Postals won't be counted today and there are a lot more of them.  In 2019 the shift to Coalition from ordinary voting (including in-electorate prepolls) to the final margin was 0.4% average (varying greatly by seat) and this might go up to, say, 0.5% this time, or it might (if Labor's postal efforts have been good enough) not change at all.  

Seats with the "wrong candidates"

The AEC has procedures for deciding which two candidates to conduct the on-the-night two-candidate-preferred count between, usually based on the result of the last election in that seat.  The AEC is likely to select some independents for the 2CP.  However when there is a change in the final two, the AEC will be counting a two-candidate result that is irrelevant to the final result, and that will be removed.

It's hard to say yet how many seats will be affected this year.  Three-cornered contests (Liberal vs Labor+Green) are obvious candidates as are teal seats like North Sydney where Labor may be 2PP-competitive but an indie may get over them.  

When the wrong 2CP candidates are selected, any 2CP figure for the right candidates that the ABC put up will be their estimate only - not real numbers.  The ABC has improved its practices for being clear about this.  This may not prevent the ABC on both TV and website from calling some of these seats for candidates, but in the past such calls have often been premature and in some cases wrong.

When the AEC selects the wrong 2CP candidates, a realignment is conducted in which the votes are distributed to the right candidates.  This is usually done alphabetically by booth.  Because different booths have very different voting patterns, the 2CP result swings around wildly during this process, often causing the seat to be projected wrongly by the ABC computer and the media.  To predict where such seats end up it is necessary to use regressions off the primary votes, and I hope to post these here where necessary.

ABC calling seats prematurely

The ABC computer system will often call classic-2PP seats as won once its projections off a certain percentage of the vote have a party ahead by a certain margin.  Sometimes these calls will be premature.  In cases in the past candidates have turned around 49:51 or worse margins on the night when postal votes are added, plus at this election there are an even greater number of within-electorate prepolls (PPVC votes) that will be counted late on the night but may display differences in swing pattern with booth voting.  The extra postal count is another issue, as discussed above.  Note that some seats, like Flynn and Macnamara, see enormous postcount shifts, and also independents are often famously poor in prepolling.  

The 2PP, and preference shift

I have been using last-election preferences in my polling-based modelling but there are some arguments that a preference shift could occur, more likely I think in Labor's favour based on teal independent preferences, the more evenhanded UAP campaign and who knows what One Nation voters will do.  On the other hand, One Nation voters might move more to Coalition.  

As the night goes on and two-party preferred counts start to appear, we may well get a feel for whether a substantial preference shift has happened and how big it is.  We will not know the exact 2PP vote on the night, and at the last election it took many weeks to be finalised.  We will probably know it to within about a point by the end of the night.

Commentary

A reminder that political-party commentators who appear on TV panels will often give biased readings of how results are going and act as cheerleaders for their parties in any seat where there is any chance (or even some seats where there's none).  This isn't always the case and sometimes a party insider will try to be objective.

Senate

Expect the Senate count to be very long, very slow, confusing and in the case of close contests challenging to project.  Thanks to the last election we have more of an idea of how party preferences flow (basically, all over the place) but it will take a while before below-the-line votes for Eric Abetz are unrolled and we have a clear idea (if they matter) where Abetz stands.  

Do not attempt to use Senate how-to-vote cards to model Senate outcomes. Most voters do not follow them, especially for smaller parties.  Please note that if someone emails me a model that does this, I will probably not even reply.  

We will probably know a few things by the end of the night, perhaps including who is in the box seat for seat 5 in every state, but much will unravel slowly over the several coming weeks and some seats could be in doubt until the press of The Button.  That said, it may again be for a half-Senate election that nearly all the seats are clear quickly.

An extra difficulty in this election could be modelling preference flows to Nick Xenophon in the event he is competitive.  Xenophon will probably struggle to get preferences because he has a blank above the line box, which confuses voters.

We will only have official Senate counts dealing with party totals on the night, and there's some doubt how advanced these counts will be even at the end of counting tonight compared to the Reps counts.  A common misconception is that only above the line votes are counted on election night so that parties with high below-the-line rates will gain in coming days - this is completely wrong.  Both above and below the line votes will be counted but they will appear by party as an undivided total.

I hope you all enjoy the coverage!