Tasmanian Election Day 2024

Live link to Mercury coverage here: https://www.themercury.com.au/news/politics/tasmanian-state-election-blog-with-political-expert-kevin-bonham/live-coverage/62c78a2ed4172adcfe9aa5ad77236ab9

----------------

Well we're here again, wherever here is.  What a weird ride this has been.

Tonight the Rockliff Liberal government chases history, for never in Tasmania has a government won four majorities at elections in a row.  Four governments including the current one have won three*.  If the polls are right, history is unlikely to be caught.  One piece of history will be made today with the restoration of the house to 35 MPs.  

Tonight I will be doing live coverage for The Mercury.  The link will be edited in to this article when available.  It may be paywalled but there is usually a cheap introductory subscription for non-subscribers.  My live blog for the Mercury will probably start somewhere around 6:30 and go until not later than 11; it may be wound down late at night as I do interviews and if I need to file an article.  I will be based at the tally room.  I ask media outside of the Mercury not to contact me by phone or email between 5:30 and about 11 tonight; once I have finished the live coverage I should be available quickly for other interviews (feel free to say hi in the tally room when I don't look too busy to arrange).    Scrutineers are very welcome to send me news and figures by phone or email.  

There may be a "late night live" thread.  My plan, energy permitting, is to post postcount threads overnight (between 1-4 am) for all five Assembly electorates.  I will be home tomorrow and available for interviews but no calls or texts before 9 am except if booked tonight.   Also no interviews between 3-5 pm.  

My main guide page is here with links to individual electorate guides and effective voting advice.  For those seeking voting advice, I recommend to number all the boxes or at the least to number every candidate who you think is OK or better.  This may make your vote more powerful and it cannot harm your preferred candidates.  If you vote 1-7 for a party and stop, your vote can play no role in determining which other parties are successful.  Check that you have not doubled or skipped any numbers, especially not between 1 and 5. Do not use ticks or crosses.

Concerning the result I have issued an aggregate of all the published polling, but am again not making anything that should be considered a prediction.  If the polls are right and voting intention has not changed in the last fortnight then the parliament might be something, very roughly, like 15 Liberal 10 Labor 4 Green 3 JLN 3 IND.  However none of the polls is less than two weeks old which is one reason for caution, another is the lack of information about the way in which the Independent vote splits up between different candidates.  The Greens are sometimes overrepresented in polling, the Lambie Network's vote has sometimes collapsed under pressure, and Labor polled worse late in the campaign compared to early on.  My article goes into more depth about why things different from the polls could happen, or not.

It is possible we will know even tonight who will be the next government, but it is also possible we will have a long wait for the final numbers and then negotiations after that.  I will not be updating this site much or at all between Easter Friday and Easter Monday because of a field trip (there probably won't be much happening then anyway).  

A few things about the counting tonight and in following days:

1. The TEC advice is that they aim to count all the booth votes, all prepolls and almost all so far received postals tonight.  I would expect some prepolls might not be completed tonight and might be held over.  There looks to have been some increase in the overall prepoll vote, perhaps a substantial one depending on yesterday's returns.

2. Keep in mind that raw quota totals are not always a reliable predictor.  A party with a slightly higher quota total will sometimes lose to a party or candidate with a slightly lower total.  Factors to consider here are: leakage as party candidates are excluded, the way candidate vote shares are spread within a party and of course preferences, which may have more impact than usual this year.  Especially, independents often stand better than a quota total indicates because an independent cannot leak votes to other parties but can only receive leakage from them.  In 2010 Andrew Wilkie in Denison, starting on 0.5 quotas, almost beat the Liberals who started on 1.79.

3. In recent elections it has been usual for all the seats to be known at party level by the end of election night except for a couple, with a few more undecided at candidate level.  This year because of the messiness of the contests and the number of seats I'm expecting there will be more vagueness and more seats for which we will need to come back after Easter to see how the preference cutups go.

4. The Hare-Clark system is often blamed for the time it takes to count Tasmanian elections.  In fact the major cause of the delay is the 10 day waiting period for postal votes to arrive, with the preference distribution probably taking 4-5 working days.  

5. The informal vote may look very high on the night but can go down a bit as votes are checked and postals added, so we will only have a vague idea tonight.  It will be interesting to see if it goes up much or not.

6. Turnout is never known on the night and always looks low on the night.  Journalists: do not comment on turnout until all the primary votes are counted in 10 days' time.

7. Early booths are very unrepresentative.  In past elections we have often seen high votes in the first few booths for: Liberals in rural booths in Bass and Lyons, Craig Garland and Felix Ellis in Braddon, Greens and left-wing candidates in Clark (especially Fern Tree booth) and Franklin (Bruny Island booths).  

Not-A-Poll

I have been running Not-A-Polls in the sidebar to get a feeling for how readers think the election will go.  I have not had time to do any fancy metrics on these and the averages aren't quite adding to 35 but the voters seem to have on average picked about 15 Liberal 12 Labor 4 Green 2 JLN/other 3 IND.  At one stage a few days in Labor took the lead on the overall outcome vote, but it has been declining since.  For instance in yesterday's voting it was 18-10 for Liberals.  

Voting Day Shenanigans

There have been widespread reports of Labor signs at polling booths, containing attacks on the Liberals and scare campaigns against voting Green and independent.  The latter are laughably misleading as the evidence they cite for the idea that independents will back the Liberal Party is a Jeremy Rockliff press statement from 20 May 2023 in which he announced that defectors John Tucker and Lara Alexander had agreed to support his government for the time being.  That that did not go smoothly is why we are here.  In short, dishonest stupol-level tactics (completely hypocritical from a party that could keep the Liberals in power itself by refusing to do deals), but the question is, are these signs legal?

In terms of electoral law it is illegal to erect a poster anywhere on polling day (S 198) and it is illegal to campaign for votes within 100 metres of a polling place (S 177).  However the TEC interpretation of S 177 based on "legal advice" is that it does not apply to signs standing within this distance before polling day at that particular polling place.  So if the signs were really put up at the proverbial five minutes to midnight, they may not be in breach of the Act in these regards.  I am unaware of the basis for the TEC's interpretation but it could be that s 177 refers to a campaigning act conducted while the booth is open and that if the Act had been intended to apply to a sign remaining up within a radius, then the Act could have said so.  There is still the question of whether they were posted with permission of the landowners of the polling booths (I would expect probably not, raising potential trespass offences and whatever you get for dumping toxic waste on somebody else's land) but that is not an Electoral Act matter.  

This is attracting coverage and I may add more comments.  As of 2:20 pm voting day, all reports I have seen relate to public schools; some signs have been removed, reportedly by the TEC at at least one booth.  Labor has also complained that election signs erected "late last night" at booths were being "stolen".  

Ticks and Crosses

I have had two reports today of TEC staff telling voters to "tick" seven boxes.  The correct instruction should be to number at least seven, or to simply tell the voter to read the instructions.  Using only ticks or crosses results in an invalid vote.  Please report all such cases to me, preferably with the name of the booth.

-----------------

Again I hope everyone enjoys the coverage tonight, even if some of you don't enjoy the result!  

--

* Ogilvie-Cosgrove-Cosgrove (ALP) 1937-41-46, Reece-Neilson-Lowe (ALP) 1972-76-79, Bacon-Bacon-Lennon (ALP) 1998-2002-2006, Hodgman-Hodgman-Gutwein (Lib) 2014-18-21