Tasmanian Election Day 2025

Live coverage at this link on election night

This article is part of my Tasmanian 2025 election coverage.  Click here for link to main guide page including links to effective voting advice and seat guides.

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We're here again Tasmania.  It seems like only yesterday that I was writing such a piece, because it almost was.  Today ends the shortest gap between elections in any Australian state since Vince Gair's Labor government destroyed itself in Queensland 1957 and started 32 years in the wilderness.  

The 11-year old Rockliff Government is chasing history that it seems to be struggling to achieve yet again.  Not since 1921 in any Australian jurisdiction has a government been forced to an election by losing a no-confidence motion and survived.  Not since 1959 has a Tasmanian government that served a whole term without a majority survived, and not since 1964 has a government elected in minority done so.  (The Reece government gained a majority for a chunk of its term on a 1961 vacancy recount).  

Tonight I will be doing live coverage for Pulse Media which will be at the link below the picture above, unless advised otherwise.  There will probably be an intro comment up around 6-ish depending on logistics but expect the real action to start around 6:30 and go til around 11 or possibly later.  I will be based at the tally room.  I ask media other than Pulse not to contact me by phone or email between 5 pm and the end of the live coverage.  I may be available quickly after that for a few 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 here.  I may start postcount threads late tonight or they may be left til tomorrow morning.  For tomorrow, I will be available for interviews mostly though I will be pretty busy through to 4 pm and unavailable for up to an hour at times.  Media are not to call or text me between 1 am and 9 am unless booked tonight.  

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 7. Do not use ticks or crosses.

Concerning the result I have issued an aggregate of public and semi-public polling which was written up here with minor revisions in my coverage of the final YouGov here.  This should again not be considered a prediction.  It's an assessment of what the polls should be taken as saying after accounting for the overestimating of the independent vote at the previous two elections.  There are obvious polling methods reasons why the independent vote appears likely to be overestimated again, but it would be very funny and chaotic if it was higher, so let's not rule that out entirely.  The final seats in Bass and Lyons are very hard to pick for me and while my reading of the polling aggregate gives both to Labor putting the total at 13-12-6-4, I would not be much surprised if one or both fell over to Inds or fourth parties - that said I don't entirely rule out Labor gains elsewhere.  

Several things about the counting tonight and in following days:

1. The count tonight will be significantly less complete than in past years.  The Tasmanian Parliament made a change in which the count of postals is delayed for a few days while it is checked that postal voters have not been marked off at a booth.  The TEC has also advised that the following prepolls will report tomorrow (morning through to early afternoon) not today:

Launceston (Bass)
Smithton and Queenstown (Braddon)
Hobart (Clark)
Rosny (Franklin)
New Norfolk (Lyons)

The TEC intends to report the remaining nine prepolls tonight but because of the large increase in prepolls, and the fact that Tasmania has not adopted a 4 pm start for prepoll processing, I expect this to take some time.  Also they expect to close for the night at 11 pm.   I may add some comments about the behaviour of these booths and past postcount shift effects to this article later today.

2. The count of booth votes early in the night may be much less representative than in past years.  Australia in recent years has had a number of elections (particularly NSW 2023) where as the on-the-day vote reduces, the on-the-day vote becomes less representative of voters as a whole (more left skewed generally) and also the scope for errors in projecting other vote types becomes larger because there are more other votes.  There is a particular reason why this could happen this year, which is that voters who have "voted angry" about being Groundhog Dayed to the polls (some for the fifth time in 21 months) may have been likelier to vote early.  

3. 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 running by themselves (as opposed to independent groups like Peter George's and Adam Martin's) 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 2024 Craig Garland, starting on 0.40 quotas, defeated the Liberals' fourth candidate despite the Liberals starting on 3.65.  Hare-Clark's nearest thing to preference snowballs could be more prominent this year because of anti-stadium voting, but there are limits.  Votes always scatter and never flow nearly 100% between candidates.

4. Certain candidates will do better or worse at certain stages of the night.  In 2024 David O'Byrne started slowly and built up votes as large blue collar Eastern Shore booths reported last.  We can monitor swings for O'Byrne from 2024 this year, but Peter George is likely to display the reverse pattern.  He will tend to poll through the roof in small coastal booths and drop off later.  I will be using his federal vote to try to project where he is going. 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, and Greens and left-wing candidates in Clark (Fern Tree booth) and Franklin (Bruny Island booths).  

5. 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.  In 2025 the party lineup is simpler in some seats than in 2024 but we will still probably have a few to several undecided at party level tonight and a few to several more undecided at candidate level - because of the incompleteness and unrepresentativeness of the count.  We will learn a lot more on Sunday.

6. 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 the last postal votes to arrive, with the preference distribution taking about 5 working days.  

7. 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 how it changes from the unacceptably high level in 2024, which was a result of the Parliament's failure to adopt savings provisions for the shift to 7 members.

8. 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.  

9. There may be some confusion and perhaps even spurious claims about where the apparent result is headed tonight, especially if the Liberals win the most seats but do not have a path to government other than the opposition parties completely failing to bang the rocks together.  I will cover this in detail on my site over coming days if necessary; the Formation section of my guide is a good place to start.  

Not-A-Polls

I have been running Not-A-Polls in the sidebar to get a feeling for how readers think the election will go.  The overall projected total has never budged from 12-12-5-5-1 but through the campaign what started around 12.0 Liberal 12.6 Labor has shifted to 12.3 Liberal 12.0 Labor.  In the late votes Labor has done particularly weakly with the last 50 votes on each major party coming out at 13.05-10.6, but these were mostly taken before last night's YouGov poll.  A reminder that winning the most seats narrowly or even perhaps by a few appears to be not enough for the Liberals to win the election.

The Next Leader To Go Not-A-Poll in the sidebar will temporarily close at 6 pm.  It will reopen in coming days only if it appears that Rockliff may have a path to government that is longer than simply meeting the parliament and losing another no-confidence motion.  

I may add further comments today if there are any voting day incidents.  For those still going to the polls stay safe, the wintry winds are blowing.  I hope everyone enjoys the coverage tonight and in days to come, whatever they think of the result.  

2024 Postcount Shifts

As much for my own reference as anything else, in 2024:

* In Bass the Greens lost around 0.6% from the booth count to the final primaries, with ungrouped losing about 0.3% with the Liberals gaining about 0.9%.  From a count including the prepolls expected tonight the Greens lost about 0.2%, ungrouped lost 0.3% and the Liberals gained 0.7%.

* In Braddon Craig Garland dropped 0.5% and the majors each gained about 0.4% from the booth count.  After including prepolls expected tonight all parties were within 0.2% of the final total, with the Greens making the largest subsequent gain and Labor slipping backwards.

* In Clark, the Greens lost 1.4% from the booth vote to final, the Liberals gained 0.9 and Sue Hickey gained 0.6.  Including the prepolls expected tonight made the Greens vote representative (they do badly in Glenorchy prepoll) and it was now Labor who were overrepresented by 0.7% with the Liberals and Hickey having 0.3% to add.

* In Franklin, the day booth count overestimated the Greens by about 1% and underestimated the Liberals by the same amount.  Including the prepolls expected tonight the Greens were still over where they finished by 0.6% with the Liberals and O'Byrne a few tenths under.

* In Lyons, the day booth count was largely representative, but slightly underestimated John Tucker.  The on the night figures after prepolls were highly representative with the Liberals dropping 0.2 from that point on.

As noted above I expect these shifts could be a lot bigger in 2025.