Western Australia 2025 Legislative Council Postcount

WA LEGISLATIVE COUNCIL: 37 SEATS

EXPECTED SEATS ALP 16 LIB 10 NAT 2 GRN 4 ON 1 LCP 1 AC 1
LIKELY SEATS LIB 1 (11)

Apparent final seat battle Moermond vs Animal Justice vs One Nation vs Sustainable Australia

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Updates (Scrolling to the top)

Thursday: Some improvement for the Liberals today, now up to 10.512 Q with 58.93% counted.  See Tally Room here for more detail about the issues with this count.  

Wednesday:  With thanks to Ben Raue and the WAEC I've been able to have a look at the booth data and some useful things can be seen.  The data don't list booths by electorate so I haven't checked to see if any booths are missing, but I can say that there don't seem to be many booths missing, about three prepolls and a handful of regular booths.  Postals are well represented in the count at about 8.3% of total, and have so far favoured both majors at the expense of nearly every minor party (one exception is AJP).  No absents are included.  

On the less useful side, I understand that BTL votes won't be reported until the final button press, which is not at all helpful for those of us trying to project the election.  But I have noticed that in general the number of formal and informal votes combined for the Council for a given booth is a few to several percent short of the count for the Assembly, which makes me wonder if the difference is below the lines or if there are other explanations.  (There are some booths with very incomplete counts.)  Anyway this is more work than I have time for at the moment but I note it for the interest of others.

As for the ATL count, it's at 57.00% of enrolment.  The last 1.1% of count has been good for ALP, Greens and Moermond and bad for the right, with the Liberals on 10.493 and Nats on 2.207 and the Moermond group up to 0.475 and in with a shout of passing the 11th Liberal into 36th place on primaries soon.  The count has been shifting quite quickly here and could well do so more when absents come in.  For now the Liberals would be fine on Nats preferences (and would also beat AJP anyway); AJP and SAP have barely moved.  One Nation is down a bit to 1.338.  Anyway for now I've upgraded ALP 16th to expected win status.  

NB I did not have time to do a lower house thread tonight.  

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Intro (Tuesday Night)

Tonight I am putting up a thread on the WA Legislative Council postcount and tomorrow I will try to do one on the seats in doubt downstairs.  I have been updating Fremantle on the live count thread but have not had time and energy yet to look closely at the rest.  I've decided to put the Legislative Council thread up separately as I often find that these can get quite long - though in this case I don't have a lot of detail.

As I start this post the count is at 55.9% of enrolment and the best place to view party totals based on above the line votes only appears to be here.  At this stage I don't see any doubt that Labor will win at least 15 seats, Liberals 10, Nationals 2, Greens 4, One Nation, Australian Christians and Legalise Cannabis one each.  Labor are currently on 15.783 quotas (Q) and should win a sixteenth seat.  The Liberals have been falling back and are on 10.538, and can probably count on a good flow from the Nationals' surplus should it survive (the Nats are currently on 2.232).  Unless the Liberals collapse they should win an eleventh seat, leaving a fight for the final seat between IND (Moermond Group) 0.467, Animal Justice 0.426, Sustainable Australia 0.366 and One Nation 1.346.  Parties that currently don't appear competitive are SPPK 0.328, SFFPWA 0.281 and Libertarians 0.234 but these will be quite important as preference sources to the extent that their voters bothered to preference.  The Greens, Legalise Cannabis and Australian Christians are all on more or less full quotas for their seats and at this stage won't be significant on preference flows, but that can change.  

The count at this stage includes no below the line votes.  I have seen speculation that the below the line rate would fall to 2%,  but it's not obvious to me that this is logical with the reduction of the number of BTL squares needed to 20 (even if the main reason for voting BTL is gone, not everyone would realise that).  Assuming the 2% estimate was true, for parties fighting out the apparent final spot, if the party's BTL rate was actually 4% then that would mean a party on .400 Q would instead be on about .408 Q, so it wouldn't be a massive difference.  Experience in NSW suggests that minor parties will have higher below the line rates than major parties, which could be a problem for the Liberals should they fall back into the group of parties fighting for the final seat.  The independent Moermond ticket might have an especially high BTL rate even if the candidate who changed his name to "Aussie Trump" doesn't get anything to speak of.  

The rate of above the line preferencing is an unknown.  WA voters are used to being unable to give preferences above the line in Legislative Council elections, but are also used to giving preferences above the line in Senate elections, which has driven an increase in above the line preferencing rates in NSW.  I welcome any scrutineering data on this question.  Probably as with NSW, preferences are capable of switching the winner of the final seat if it is close.  

Minor party how to vote cards will have negligible follow rates but for what it's worth neither SPPK nor SAP recommended preferences.  Libertarians recommended preferences to SFFPWA, SPPK, One Nation, Moermond, Legalise Cannabis, National and Liberal in that order.  SFFPWA recommended preferences to Libertarians, Christians, One Nation, National and Liberal.  

In the Senate it has generally been the case that the major parties, Greens and One Nation outperform everyone else on ATL preferences.  In One Nation's case they will do well on minor right preferences whether a minor right party recommends preferences to them or not.  But in the NSW LegCo Animal Justice has at times done very well on preferences because it tends to benefit from left voters being more likely to vote through.  The difficulty here is that there really aren't a lot of left-wing preferences for AJP to benefit from if they remain behind the Moermond group.  

What would be of most use here is a stronger indication of where the counted votes did and didn't come from.  This is something I have not found on the WAEC website.  Four seats that had no within-division prepoll booth are likely to be undercounted (Baldivis, Butler, Forrestfield, Kalamunda) and a couple of these are good for One Nation, but they may not be especially undercounted cf others.  If anyone sees a link to progress by district that would be handy.

Another point is that the quotas are so small!  I am used to 0.1 Q being a big lead in such counts but in this case it's only 0.26%, which can easily come and go, especially for a major party.  The Liberal vote dropped by 0.016 Q in the time it took me to write this article.  For the minor parties the vote shares tend to move around less through the count.  While I've kept Sustainable Australia in the mix for now they are in a similar position to one I've seen in NSW Legislative Council counts, in which arena they've consistently done nothing and lost.  But because the quota is so small and there are a lot of uncertainties I think we should be cautious about assuming that only the last seat is in play.

No matter what, Labor and the Greens appear set for a combined majority.  I think Labor would like AJP to take the final seat as that gives them AJP + Legalise Cannabis as a possible route to majority that doesn't need the Greens.