2023 Voice Referendum Live

No has won the Voice referendum and will win every state and NT

Yes will win ACT (does not count for double majority)

Yes tracking for vote just below 40% but exact vote still to settle.

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Things We Won't Know Tonight

I am putting this paragraph at the top because every election some people jump the gun with comments about two issues before the count is finished.  We will not know the final turnout tonight or tomorrow - it will rise over the next two weeks as postal and absent votes are added.  Always there are articles and tweets complaining about how bad the turnout is at elections without waiting to see what the turnout ends as. 

Unless the result is very high or very low for Yes we won't know tonight which polls were the most accurate.    The referendum vote will shift in coming weeks, probably more so than a normal election.  Also, assessing polling accuracy at a referendum is complicated because many pollsters release final results with an undecided figure included.  We should have a rough idea of how good the polls were overall.

Also a note that nearly all informal votes will be deliberate (and not crosses).

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Live Comments

1:15 Signing off here after a result that after months of watching polling ended up extremely unsurprising.  It is also unsurprising by historic standards, a typical thrashing for a mid-term Labor referendum without bipartisan support.  There will be more to look at in coming days but for the moment, goodnight all!

12:51 After I have had some sleep I will look at the postal picture to see what postals might be capable of knocking off the national total.  

12:35 Bradfield is the only Coalition seat where Yes is apparently winning. Deakin has not yet been called but we have seen the postals movie here before.  

11:55 Yes well that didn't take long, Yes now falls below 40 for the time being.  

11:44 I've been quiet for a while but just a note that the national Yes is not far from falling below 40 and may well cross 40 before the night is out.

10:23 WA is still holding up better for Yes than might have been expected to be the case at this stage.  

9:53 At the moment the Yes vote looks like landing in the middle of a pack of pollsters who may all be very close to the final outcome.  The higher readings of Essential and Morgan are not looking so good but there is a cluster around 40% with FocalData, Newspoll, Freshwater, YouGov and DemosAU all in the mix (Redbridge's 38% looks a bit low but not too far off.)

9:45 At the moment WA is projecting better than the polling but we have seen in the other states that the projection starts high then falls off later.  

9:40 Darcy Murphy on Twitter is tracking by elimination the Indigenous Yes vote in the remote booths in Lingiari and posted an estimate that it was running at 79%.

9:30 No has clearly won Victoria.  A couple of the late polls in WA were extremely bad for Yes so the question is whether WA plus prepolls and postals can yet drag Yes below 40.  The usual start in the WA small rural booths with tiny Yes votes.  

9:08 I've been quiet for a while waiting for WA to come in.  Depending on that state it is now starting to look like Yes could land below my polling average (41.3) but not by very much.

8:36 In Victoria it's notable that the more pro-Yes seats have less progressed counts because they will have larger absent votes and prepolls.  But with postals still coming and the Yes vote still not getting significantly above 48 it's very hard to see Yes getting there.

8:13 Victoria is not looking likely to carry at the moment as prepolls and postals start to drag it down.  

8:05 Some Victorian seats are showing very bad results for Yes in early postals - Chisholm and Corangamite way down on the booth count so far.  Also looking at a number of NSW and Vic seats I am seeing that Yes is 5 or so points down in prepoll cf booth votes, which is worse than what I was seeing so far in Tasmania.  The PB national projection is now falling and has come down to 42.5 Yes. 

7:55 Continuing to see relatively benign prepolls - they don't do much. The first Braddon postals are running 7% below the on the day booths.  

7:47 The first prepolls have come in in Lyons and they're actually not that bad for Yes since the Launceston Lyons PPVC was a Liberal booth in the election but has come in around the Yes average.  

7:35 Looking at the current Pollbludger projections, in general states are running at about what my polling average projection had for them with the exception of Victoria running about 3% above and hence competitive.  We are yet to see WA and NT.

7:27 Brief break there while getting food.  In the early counting several Queensland divisions are running at below 20% but there is not much in from the urban seats.  

7:15 That was fast!  First tiny Queensland booths are coming in and it's the usual story.  A note that we're yet to see what prepolls and postals do anywhere and it will be interesting when they arrive.  

It's looking like the teal seats are holding up well for Yes so far.  

7:07 Yes seems to be doing very well in Victoria generally where it's a few points up on the polling estimates, and that's the main thing driving the national projection up.  

7:01 Yes is in general tracking on the bright side of the polling average at the moment and is projecting to win several seats it was losing in the Focaldata model.  We'll need to see how this holds up when prepolls and postals start to be added. 

6:53 The first Clark booths are coming in and we are starting to see the famous electoral divide between Hobart and Glenorchy (locally if politically incorrectly called the "flanellette curtain".   Yes is winning every Hobart City booth (inner city, very left, high Green vote), even the Liberal ones, and losing in Glenorchy (more working class formerly high Labor, though lately colonised by independents more and more).  And I agree with Antony - No has won Tasmania.

6:51 As bigger booths come in, Yes is not doing as badly as might have been feared, and is now projecting to about 42 on the Pollbludger projection - but outside Victoria it's hard to see a possibly competitive state.

6:46 Some rural booths in SA coming in with negligible Yes votes, much worse than 1999, but they are tiny.  

6:43 In the early count Yes is leading about 20 divisions in NSW and Victoria combined though postals will likely take care of some leads and many could be just one or two good booths.  

6:41 Some what might be called tealy booths in Franklin are being won by Yes, but not by much.  Yes will get some very high numbers in parts of Clark on this basis.

6:38 A high vote for Yes in the very Green Launceston booth of Trevallyn, Bass (62%) - not surprising

6:33 An Indigenous booth in in Tasmania: Lady Barron 56.6% Yes. Sidmouth (Bass) no swing, hard to see Voice getting up in Tasmania on what we have seen so far.

6:30 Polls have closed in South Australia

6:29 Early pattern in Braddon is that the swing from the Republic to yes is bigger in the first urban booth (Devonport North) and negligible in rural booths.  

6:25 Vote count starting in Tasmania - the first booth in Franklin was Hobart electorate office which was predictably a Yes booth.  Scamander has a 5% swing from the Republic (not enough)

6:22 The informal vote is negligible so far, below 1%.  At this early stage Yes is going badly in NSW but more competitive in Vic.

6:20 Votes now flooding in with Yes at 37% in the "national" count so far and Pollbludger projecting 40.  

6:17 A 37.6% booth for Yes in Whitlam, but this is a booth that voted 60-40 for Labor last year.  

6:15 Off and running with some small rural booths coming in with extremely low Yes votes (10-25%) in Parkes and Wannon.  The Glenthompson booth which is the highest for Yes has a 7% swing away from the Republic.  

6:10 Laura Tingle on ABC mentions people not knowing Indigenous people as a factor.  Interestingly Resolve found voters who had at least one Indigenous friend were slightly less likely to support Yes not more (correlation does not equal causation of course, since many such people would be conservative rural voters, but does show that knowing Indigenous people does not guarantee a Yes vote.)

6:05 Note that PollBludger is attempting a projection.  For amusement I've got referendum booths for four of the five divisions in Tasmania (might look at some others as well). Tasmania voted 40.4% Yes in 1999 so the Voice Yes needs to average close to republic +10 to pass.

6:00 (all times eastern time) Polls now closing on south-eastern seaboard and this thing is on!  Note I will be especially interested in Tas (my home state and one with a lot of speculation about outcome)

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Intro Post (1:45 pm)

Referendum day is here at last!  Tonight I will be doing live coverage on here in my usual style - when things get busy refresh every 10 mins or so for the latest comments.  The count will be frantic from about 6:15 to 8:00 eastern time and I won't be running any especially detailed modelling or projections but I hope I'll spot some things of interest.  As a referendum doesn't have the usual hanging on for seats in doubt I won't have the usual array of postcount threads but there will be something.  There will be an article about polling accuracy after all the votes are counted, perhaps slightly delayed by a field trip that ends on 31 October.  

Votes will fly in thick and fast; as Antony Green notes (blog post, podcast), with Yes most likely starting low and rising, and the question being the point at which Yes flattens out.  Depending on how many postals get counted tonight there could be potential for Yes to lose say 1% after the night, but we'll see how that goes. (There will be projections off existing postals but these may underestimate Yes.)

No further polls came out this morning so my polling aggregate is finished.  I find that the polls on average project a 41.3% Yes vote on a two-answer basis, if undecided voters are reallocated proportionally.  The simple average of the final polls by ten pollsters, which quite often turns out to be a better measure than my aggregate, is 41.8%.   These are not predictions.  My article includes various estimates of the Yes vote prior to allocating undecided voters (who are about 7%), so that if the undecided voters break more strongly to No then the polls might project Yes into the high 30s.  The polls on average could still be substantially off in either direction, but it would take a massive failure for Yes to win.  The dispersal in the polls - which has been fascinating, no herding to see here - reflects the fact that different question frames and other methods choices have more impact than at elections, where there is more consensus on how things are best done.

In the final days there has been much talk about turnout with people saying it might be as low as 80-85%, but there has not been much evidence advanced for this.  The Marriage Law Postal Survey nearly reached 80%, and it was voluntary (albeit postal).  Prepolls are up by 1.5% of enrolment on the 2022 election, but postals are likely to be down by 4% of enrolment.  Postal voting spiked upwards in 2022 because of COVID and presumably those who voted postally will split instead to prepolls and booth voting.  There have been claims low turnout could hurt No, but these are not convincing.  The few reliable polls that have asked about likelihood of voting have not found this.  

The AFR had an article by Mike Turner claiming that "Analysis of previous plebiscites, the 1999 republic referendum and the 2017 same-sex marriage vote shows that areas which voted most strongly against the proposition had lower turnout."  That's not what I get for 1999; I get the opposite:

(Two outliers with very low turnout are excluded - Kalgoorlie with 86.65% turnout and 37.87% Yes and Northern Territory with 84.96% turnout and 48.77% Yes).

The reason for this is simple: inner cities tend to have more enrolment churn issues and more young people who are more likely to fail to vote, but are also likely to vote Yes.  

Some notes from the booths - (i) there have been a lot of comments about No struggling for handout volunteers on the day, not that most people need a card to tell them what to do but it is just possible lack of presence could sway a tiny number of last-minute deciders (ii) Yes corflutes have, amazingly, been seen repeating the claim that 80% of Indigenous voters support the Voice, and sourcing that claim to the Ipsos poll from January!  (Some subsamples this week suggested Indigenous support had dropped, perhaps much like the rest of Australia, but all of this has been not very reliable.)