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Bean - Expected ALP retain (very close)
Fremantle - Expected ALP retain
Franklin - Called by me as easy ALP win on election night but included because some people are being silly
Click here for link to Reps postcount hub and tallyboard page
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This page covers seats where Labor is leading the primary count, the AEC initially counted votes as ALP vs Liberal, but an independent has either clearly or probably made the final two and the count is now being realigned by the AEC. The main two seats of interest here, Bean and Fremantle, have common ingredients in that an independent seemed to be very competitive on the night and still looks close in the realignment, but past experience suggests the independents may struggle as the postcount continues.
Bean (ACT, ALP 13.0%)
Bean is the least strong of Labor's three ACT seats on a 2PP basis and for some reason a Climate 200 backed indie, Jessie Price, emerged to challenge David Smith, who is seen as a bit of a weak link by some on the left. The news that Price might try to paint Tuggeranong teal was treated with much ridicule online but Price has actually done very well. Just maybe not quite well enough. Smith 41.31% leads Price 26.61, Lamberton (Lib) 23.11 and Carter (Green) 8.96.
Only two useful counts have been realigned to Labor vs Price so far, these being Parkes PPVC and about 5000 postals. It appears from this that Price is doing better on the Liberal preferences than the Green preferences; indeed Smith seems to be doing very badly on the postals. In the Parkes count where 64% of the preferences are Liberal, Price is getting 65.1% of all preferences. In the postals where 80.4% of the preferences are Liberal, she is getting 76.6%. Over the electorate as a whole, 72.1% of the preferences are Liberal, so by interpolation 70.3% is my starting and extremely rough estimate of the overall preference flow to Price (the Liberals must have recommended preferences to her). On that basis, I get Smith at 50.83% in the live count. The ABC has Price in front but I suspect they are overweighting the postals on account of their larger number. Anyway my estimate is sufficiently close that I definitely need to see more than two data points before being sure Smith is ahead in the live count at all, but with what has been seen in other similar counts where independents fall over I am not sure he needs to be.
Tuesday 2:20 pm: Many more booths are coming in. My latest projection is a 70.7% preference flow to Price and Smith with 50.70 2CP in the live count.
5:05: A bad preference flow result in the Tuggeranong prepoll has caused the ABC projection to flip to Smith, however the ABC projection is overweighting that prepoll because it is now most of the preferences available, but is unrepresentative. However this plus other booths has knocked my projection down to 50.03 for Smith, which is very close!
Wednesday 2:10 With more booths in Smith is on 50.60 in the live count and 50.62 in my projection. There is not too far to go for the realignment so soon we will know exactly where we stand! I should note that what is going on here so far is Smith did spectacularly badly on preferences in the Tuggeranong prepoll (21.8%) but on average is getting over 30% elsewhere. As this continues his preference flow should rise and the ABC projection should improve for him. It is likely mine is a little too optimistic for Smith because it treats the Tuggeranong prepoll as a single data point, which is actually well below trend and a big chunk of votes.
Wednesday 5:45 At this point we may as well wait for the realignment to finish as there are not many votes left to realign. The live count is at 50.24 to Smith.
Wednesday 7:10 An interesting matter noted in comments is the Norfolk Island prepoll. It only took 441 votes in 2022 but those votes were 14 points worse on 2PP for Labor than the seat average. The day booth, which is in the primary count, was only four points worse in 2022, but is spectacularly bad for Labor this year so the prepoll could be really ugly!
Thursday 12:00 Incredibly close in the live count! Now down to 94 votes!
Thursday 12:45 While I was on a briefing call to the AEC and asking about Norfolk Island the Norfolk Island day booth dropped ... putting Price into the lead! I understand the prepoll will drop shortly.
Thursday 2:00 And yep here it is. the Norfolk Island prepoll boosts Price by another 174 votes and she now leads by 194. The realignment is complete now I think; Smith has to get that back on absents as the postals don't do anything.
Friday 2:00 Bean could be going to the wire! The first batch of absents is in and they were bad for Price on the primary vote (-5.36 vs ordinaries) but they were also bad for Smith (-4.22). And they were bad for the Liberals (-1.99) so of course they were hugely good for the Greens (+11.57). Price is doing badly on preferences from this absents batch getting only 60.5% of them compared to 72.2% on ordinaries and 74.1% on postals. This presumably comes from the preference pool being much more Green and less Liberal than usual. As more absents come in this might moderate, but I'm not sure it will - absents in 2022 were +9.16 for the Greens compared to ordinaries but that was without an indie competing better for booth votes than absents. If this split is representative - and it may well not be as I have no idea where these votes are from - the remaining 1423 absents could knock about 87 votes off Price's current lead of 165. But will the pattern spread to the 3546 dec prepolls? In general, urban teals in 2022 all did badly on the dec prepoll primary vote, with Labor and the Greens doing well. This could repeat and save Smith - he may also do well on provisionals which skew left.
Friday 6:15 Another lot of absents but they were even worse for Price on primary votes and 2CP than the first lot and Smith now trails by only 54 (which he might even erase on remaining absents). This makes his position much easier as if even a whiff of this flows through to out of division prepolls he will win.
Saturday 12:45 And Smith gains 50 on the first few hundred out of division prepolls. He's still 4 behind but I don't see how Price can hold on.
Sat 3:00 Smith 124 ahead now, outside the automatic recount margin.
Sat 9:00 Smith 183 ahead now and I'm now very confident he will retain the seat.
Fremantle (WA, ALP 16.9%)
After narrowly losing the state seat of Fremantle, Climate 200 backed indie Kate Hulett has run for the federal seat. According to her podcast she survived a hair-raising Section 44 scare by renouncing a dual UK citizenship in great haste after firing off emails to everyone she could think of remotely connected with the UK until an account unknown to her wrote back and said 'hey, try this guy'. She did and it worked. The Liberals recommended preferences against her in the state election over her support for the environmental activist group Disrupt Burrup Hub, but she still got just over half their preferences on their exclusion and nearly won anyway. This time her tilt at the harder federal seat has been helped out by the Liberals deciding to recommend preferences to her.
Currently Josh Wilson (ALP) has 39.41%, Hulett 23.26%, Tait Marston (Lib) 18.59%, the Greens 10.98%, One Nation 5.90% (high for Freo and the Socialist Alliance and Citizens Party are locked in a valiant battle for last on 0.94 and 0.91 respectively. Even if Hulett drops back in late counting, Greens preferences will ensure the Liberals cannot overtake her. In the present live count, Hulett needs 71.6% of preferences to win.
As with Bean our realigned preferences are at this stage limited to a prepoll (Fremantle PPVC) and as with Bean, Hulett is getting a better preference share in the two of these where the Liberal Party share of votes to be thrown is higher. She has 71.9% of preferences in the prepoll where the Liberal share of all votes to be thrown is 52.6% and 76.6% in the postals where the Liberal share of all preferences is 59.8%. I should caution though that for the postals I don't have the primaries for the votes specifically realigned to 2CP, only the overall postal primaries to date, which may be slightly different. In the count overall the Liberal share of votes to be thrown (49.8%) is actually lower than in both these parcels. So while Hulett is currently projecting to lead based off the flows in these parcels, I would caution that when we get to the day votes with more Green voters who don't follow how to vote cards, the rate could drop below the target rate - in the state election the split off the Green distribution excluding the few votes that went to the Liberals was 62.2% to Hulett. I also suspect that Hulett needs more than a tiny lead after what happened when she hit absents in the state election. So in Wilson's position I would not be panicking yet.
Tuesday 2:45: As we have some, limited, booth data coming in I have run new projections, one based off Hulett's share of the vote and one based off the Liberal share of all preferences. At the moment neither corellates strongly with her preference share but this may change once larger booths go in. She gets 68.4% and 67.5% respectively in these models, which would put her on 48.8 and 48.4 two-candidate preferred meaning Wilson would win. However need to see some larger and more representative on the day booths to firm up this model.
Tuesday 10:00: Hulett's position has weakened in my model further, I now have her on 48.2 and 48.0 in the two versions. The ABC is still giving her 72% of preferences but this is a flow she got in one prepoll and hasn't been matching in booths since. She is an independent who is being assisted by Liberal preferences and both independents and Liberals tend to do badly on absent votes so I expect her position to weaken further and I now firmly expect Josh Wilson to retain.
Franklin (Tas, ALP 13.7%) - ALP easy win, called on election night
This is the seat, very safe on a two-party basis, where former ABC journalist Peter George has run a major and apparently very well funded, Climate 200 backed campaign that was initially mostly about opposition to industrial salmon farming but later spread to other issues. George's path through the mess into second place became much easier when yours truly discovered in five minutes' perusal that the Greens candidate had an obvious Section 44 issue. By normal standards George has polled well, but he's failed to expand beyond the natural base of his campaign into sending a message about Franklin being neglected as a safe seat. I suspect that is because the voters of Franklin, like the rest of Tasmania, were far more concerned with sending a stronger message about Peter Dutton and his campaign.
The George campaign has been making claims about the seat being forced to a close preference race but this is utter utter utter utter nonsense. At the moment Collins on 39.25% primary leads George on 22.10% primary, so George needs 72.2% of preferences, which he probably would have struggled to get even had the Liberals recommended preferences to him on their how to vote card. The asking rate could also well go up after absents and more postals, both of which indies frequently do badly on.
Around 4000 postals are the only votes so far re-aligned as Collins (ALP incumbent) vs George and in these Collins got 53% of preferences. Because candidates tend to get better preference flows in areas where they poll better, and because George is running 5% below his overall vote in postals, I would expect George to do better on preferences overall than in these postals. He might get, say, 50-50 or a little better. But it doesn't matter; it's exceedingly unlikely he gets 60 and he definitely won't get near 72. I don't know what the ABC's projection of 56.9% to Collins is based on; I'd expect it to be somewhat more than that and I don't know why the ABC hasn't called the seat or what point there is in trying to hype something that simply is not happening.
Tuesday 12:15: The ABC website has been projecting Franklin as very close (50.1) because they blundered by projecting the count off a couple of Bruny Island booths where the flow to George is obviously going to be very strong, ignoring the already used postal flows and the relationship between candidate vote strength and preference flow. Their projection is garbage.
After a slight tweak their projection is 50.6 to ALP. My current projection off the four booths counted based on the relationship between the George primary and the preference flow is 60.7.
Tuesday 3:15 A few more booths in and my projection has come down slightly to 59.9, the ABC's is still only at 51.0 with statements about the preference flows that are just blatantly incorrect.
Tuesday 5:35 ABC projection 52.2, me 60.3
Tuesday 7:20 ABC 57.2, me 60.1
Wed 1:40 ABC 57.7, me 59.5
Thursday Amusingly if somewhat embarrassingly mine actually had an error in it too (but not such a consequential one) and has now converged on the current figure (57.5), and also should have done so yesterday (if not earlier).
Hi Kevin. Thanks for all your great analysis particularly in Franklin where there's a lot of misinformation circulating about the result. I'd be interested to hear your take on Peter George's claim that this was a vote against salmon because he performed well in booths that are close to salmon farms. If you compare 2025 to previous elections does it show a significant change or do booths in areas like the Channel and Bruny Island tend to attract a high Green vote anyway?
ReplyDeleteSorry I didn't get a notification for this comment until just now. I'll look at this closely down the track but yes Bruny Island always has a stratospheric Green vote (very small booths though) and yes the Channel is a particularly strong area for them too, there are a few booths there that they quite often win in elections where they don't win anything else. I think that what George has got is basically a turbocharged version of the Green vote - boosted by the scale of the campaign and by him being an independent (some voters will not vote for the Greens as a party but will gladly support indies who are indistinguishable from them.)
DeleteI was literally just about to ask about the ABC projection showing it super close.
ReplyDeleteGlad you've clarified - makes sense if the projection is completely unrepresentative.
Yep, out of curiosity just did a linear regression of TPP versus FP votes by polling station and worked out the overall votes assuming all remaining polling stations have TPP following that linear trend, and it came out almost exactly the same as your projection!
ReplyDeleteOop never mind, I'm getting about 56.9% for Collins... still, well away from the ABC's projection
ReplyDeleteCompletely irresponsible projection committed by the ABC that was left up for far too long (7 hours). Your conclusion is much the same as the one I came to after my shock spurred me towards investigation on the AEC tally room website.
ReplyDeleteI'd like to assume incompetence but knowing George is a former ABC journalist does make me wonder.
Re Bean, will be interesting once the Norfolk Island Pre Poll numbers are known. This wasn't particularly strong for labor last time around. (25% primary and barely 50% 2PP v Liberal). Last time got the count on the Tuesday
ReplyDeleteI was wondering the same thing. It's at present the only booth in the entire country not to have published first prefs. Furthermore, if you go to the AEC statistics page, it's not listed in the spreadsheet outlining the number of votes received at each prepoll per day. But people must have voted there- David Smith posted on Facebook it was open from April 30 and the election day booth total is far too low for it to have been cancelled at the last minute due to logistical issues or the like. Perhaps something for a journo to chase up with the AEC...
Delete@Marcus I strongly suspect the PPVC votes have to be flown back to Canberra for even the initial first preference counting - I would assume they'd try to get it on the Sunday afternoon Qantas flight to Sydney, but the logistics might be more complex than that, and maybe it's back of the queue by the time it reaches Canberra
DeleteInteresting- I'd presumed they would've counted them on the island. Though that still leaves the mystery of why there is no record of the number of votes issued in the spreadsheet found here (https://www.aec.gov.au/election/fe25/downloads-statistics.htm) as there is for every other prepoll booth
Delete@Marcus and @ajd: as @ajd said, the Norfolk Is votes are couriered to Canberra where they were received by AEC only this morning at the Queanbeyan counting centre. The boxes were therefore first checked for formality and counted for first prefs by one counting team before being passed to different counting teams for a check of both those things and then sorting into 2CP preferences. A bit like a replication of the initial count on election night at the polling booth and then the recheck the following week by the counting centre, but without any preference throw at the first count. As things now stand (end of Thursday counting) it's anybody's guess what will happen with Absent and Declaration votes to be counted tomorrow morning, and Provisional to come. At the last election they were better than 60-40 for Labor, but who knows whether the Labor-Indie contest will be a lot different to Labor-Liberal? Not sure there's any useful precedent to look at?
DeleteA further thought, a campaign colleague has pointed out that the Labor share of absent, declaration and provisional votes for Bean wasn't hugely different to their ordinary vote share at the last two elections. So the Price lead at this stage may hold, but the result is still likely to be very close.
DeleteRe Bean - I noticed that 8 votes from the mobile team 1 was removed today from the count - they went 5 ALP v 3 IND 2CP - wondering what may have happened to these?
ReplyDeleteSo, a mathematician I am not, but on my reading Smith would now need just under 53% (2CP) of the absent and prepoll declaration votes to go his way to win? That is presuming the small remaining number of postals continue going 50:50 and most of the in-division provisional votes are rejected
ReplyDeleteYou asked the same question I was going to! I’d say you’re right, but I think it’d be a pretty big anomaly if they broke that much for Smith.
DeleteI'm impressed how good a predictor the first prefs have been for TPP... almost all booths are in and we're at 57.8%... I'm not a psephologist, is there a reason your prediction is closer to 60%? Do you expect provisional and declaration pre-polls to break heavily to Collins?
ReplyDeleteTurns out there was a silly error in mine too, which should have been giving figures in the 57s at least yesterday.
DeleteWonder how many Norfolk Islanders cast an absent ballot on the mainland..
ReplyDeleteHi Kevin, once the full count has finalized many months from now is it possible based on AEC figures to determine the Condorcet winner in each seat? I imagine the vast majority of the time the Condorcet winner is the actual winner (Ryan, say, aside), but I've been thinking about the situation in Forrest, Grey and some others where the IND has failed to make the 2CP, particularly in coalition held seats. Is it possible to determine whether Chapman and Kuss would have been majority winner based on the figures the AEC supplies?
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately not; there is no 2CP result found between any independent who finishes third and the winner so it is impossible to check for Condorcet winners from the figures. (In contrast where one of the majors misses the 2CP we still get their 2PP vs the other major). I can say that I have seen some scrutineering impressions from Grey that suggest Kuss would win the 2CP fairly comfortably vs Venning (say 52.5) and I would suspect the same is also true for Chapman vs Small in Forrest.
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