Could Just 2000 Shifting Votes Swing The ACT Election?

 Advance Summary

No.

(This article is rated 5/5 on the Wonk Factor scale.  It is extremely mathsy and technical.)

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Yesterday the ABC published an article that claimed that the Liberals could win the 2020 ACT election if just 2,000 ACT voters switched their vote compared to how they voted in 2016.  The article is still up and the author continued to defend it after both Tim Colebatch and I independently pointed out on Twitter why it was incorrect, so here is an article to explain in detail why this claim is not correct.  In the process I hope to highlight that interpreting Hare-Clark spreadsheets really is rocket science and that a simple question like "how close was the election?" can have a very complex answer.  

ACT Election Live and Post-Count Comments

Labor minority government returned - ALP 12 Liberal 11 Green 2.  
This was also the interim outcome

Postcount Comments

(NB Through the week I will be posting comments here only in the evening, because of work commitments)

What happens now is that votes are gradually entered into the computer and a series of interim preference distributions are released, leading up to the final "button press" which is expected to happen next Saturday.  As we get closer to the full count these should become more accurate as an indication of what will happen, but for the time being it is useful to keep an eye on differences between the current primary count (which is based on more votes) and the primary count for the interim distributions, and also to bear in mind that the counting of postal votes may favour the Liberals.

Saturday: It's over!  In Brindabella Nicole Lawder (Lib) has won the final seat from Labor's Angie Drake by 553 votes.  Drake outlasted Steven Bailey by 307 votes at the second-last exclusion, but had Bailey survived that exclusion he would have lost anyway, probably by more than Drake did.  In Ginninderra the Ginninderra Effect has indeed struck again - Labor with 2.74 quotas at the final exclusion have won three seats while the Greens with 0.78 at the same point have missed out.  This is because two of the Labor candidates had a very evenly split share of their party's votes, and indeed it wasn't all that close between them and the Greens (701 votes for Tara Cheyne over Esguerra with Gordon Ramsay actually ahead of Cheyne at that point).  In Murrumbidgee the Greens are up by 800.  The other two electorates were decided by thousands.

How To Best Use Your Vote In ACT (and Tasmanian) Elections

This is a quick note because there are some incorrect myths doing the rounds about how people should vote in the ACT election today.  I was asked to write this piece because there have been some claims that voters who vote for independents should refuse to preference anyone but independents.  A claim to this effect was recently published in the Canberra Times in an otherwise generally good article.  It happens that the same advice I'm giving here for the ACT also applies to Tasmanian lower house elections, because both use the Hare-Clark system, albeit with some minor differences.

My basic recommendation for both ACT and Tasmanian elections is simple: If you want to make your vote as powerful as possible, number every square.  Don't even leave the final box blank.  If you don't feel you can number all the squares, you should number as many as you can.

This is the key incorrect claim from the Canberra Times article: