2025 Election Night Arrangements And Election Watching Tips

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My coverage tonight and to come

I will be doing live blogging for the Guardian from c. 6:30 pm.  Live coverage has started here. Comments will be occasional when I have something substantial to note.  I will also be contributing to this map here

 I expect to be working on that until at least midnight.  I may or may not pop up on Twitter or Bluesky during quiet moments (such as the mid-evening lull before prepolls start bucketing in around 9:30) or to formally call Tasmanian seats.  The format of the blogging is not known to me yet but it will be open to the public.  I will also be helping the Guardian out with seat calls which I must stress I expect to be of a provisional and not so definitive nature!

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 Guardian not to call me until the live blog has finished.  However if you have interesting scrutineering samples from Tasmania or anything else wildly interesting 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.  

Once the live blog has finished I will switch to late night coverage on this site for as long as I can handle it, or if things have quietened down I may start a postcount thread or two.  I have an engagement tomorrow lasting much of the day and postcount threads will begin in earnest from around late afternoon, with a special focus on messy three-cornered seats and as usual a single thread for the vanilla postcount seats.

For booth data, keep an eye on Pollbludger; if working reliably their feed is far better than anything else out there and I will make heavy use of it alongside watching the ABC.

I will not be doing any in person media interviews on Sunday.  Phone interviews may or may not be possible.  

I am not expecting any scientific exit polling.  Any exit polls reported by media are probably unscientific and unreliable though any ascribed to regular voting intention pollsters may have some curiosity value.  

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.  There will also be a limited postal count on the night but some of the Victorian seats especially have had massive postal rates and what we see tonight will be just a small sample.  It is also the case that early postals tend to be stronger for Coalition than those arriving later and so projecting off them will be risky.  

In 2022 the 2PP shift to Coalition from ordinary voting (including in-electorate prepolls) to the final margin was 0.28 points.  Because some postals will be counted tonight (about 2000 per seat) I expect the shift from the end of tonight to the final 2PP will be smaller.  This however varies by seat, with some seats such as Macnamara and Flynn frequently having very high postal vote shifts in post-counting.  There will probably also be some seats where not all within-electorate prepolls get reported on the night (based on past experience).  

Prepoll as a share of enrolment has risen at this election from 32.2% to 37.4%.  On the other hand the postal application rate has fallen slightly from 15.7% to 14.1%; not all of these voters actually vote by post, but overall this is about 3.5 points that is coming out of the on-the-day vote.  It is a growing problem in elections that on-the-day swings are less and less representative; this could particularly bite this year as we are also coming off a COVID-influenced election - all up I am suggesting a lot of caution about calls off booth votes alone.  It is also worth noting that even when independents appear to be doing very well in booth voting they often do badly on absents because of the lack of a presence outside their electorate, and we have seen many cases in recent state elections where independents who appeared to be winning early in the night have not won.

In 2022 there was a loose curfew of midnight for prepoll counting; I do not know if that is being repeated.  

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 always hard to say yet how many seats will be affected by this this year. Second-tier independent contests are the obvious candidates (the incumbent teals should reliably make the final two) and exclusion orders for contests involving Green target seats can often be unclear.  

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 once these processes start during the weeks.  

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, because it tends to call seats at 99% win probability, though some of these get overturned.  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 2PP, and preference shift

I have been using last-election preferences (mostly) in my polling-based modelling but there are some arguments that a preference shift could occur.  At this election most of the speculation has been around One Nation and other minor parties possibly going more than usual to Coalition; it is also possible that independent flows could strengthen for Labor.  Changes in the mix of minor parties subsumed under "Others" (for instance the debut of Family First v 2) can also have an impact.  

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 it takes several 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.

Poll Accuracy

Pollsters often crow about how accurate they were in the days after an election.  Ignore all such crowing and also any articles that assess it prematurely - beyond in the broadest terms.  The numbers move around a lot and pollsters dip in and out of being closest to the pin.  I will publish my formal assessment of which polls were most accurate when all the votes are counted, not before!

Turnout

Likewise we also always get people complaining about low turnout in the days following the election, and sometimes some very bad media articles about it - it takes weeks to know the final turnout as it continues to grow.  

Senate

The Senate count is always very long, very slow, confusing and in the case of close contests very challenging to project.  It's a slow burner and the votes counted on the night tend to be unrepresentative.   Elaborate projections are needed in the case of close seats and I expect we'll be doing lots of those in coming weeks.  For example the 2022 Senate count on the night gave rise to an urban myth that Legalise Cannabis nearly defeated Pauline Hanson in Queensland. In fact Hanson finished fifth above Labor after preferences, Legalise Cannabis finished eighth below the LNP (who also lost), and Legalise Cannabis were more than 5% off defeating anybody.  

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 can sometimes be for a half-Senate election that nearly all the seats are clear quickly.

We will only have official Senate counts dealing with party totals on the night, and in 2022 even by Tuesday these were only about halfway.  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.  This year, there are not really any contests where below the line votes will be a big deal but there may be some cases where leakage from them out of party tickets matters.  

I hope you all enjoy the coverage!