The Amazing 2026 South Australian Election: Final Lower House Results And Poll Performance

SA 2026 ALP 34 (+5) Lib 5 (-9) ON 4 (+4) IND 4 (-)
(Changes from pre-election/notional; Labor gained two seats from Liberal during 2022-6 term)

Estimated 2PP ALP 57.89 vs Liberal (+3.3)

Estimated "Shadow 2PP" ALP 58.19 vs One Nation

The 2026 South Australian lower house was remarkable in so many ways.  It makes Queensland 1998 seem almost boring by comparison, except that Queensland 1998 was there first.  Maybe all elections are going to be like this now and this soon will not seem so unusual but if that's so my colleagues and I are going to have a very busy time in the future!

All manner of curious things happened here.  Finally, someone (Lou Nicholson in Finniss) won a state or federal seat from fourth on primaries; hooray we have lived to see it.  Both majors missed the 2CP in Stuart and Mount Gambier in the first such cases since Nicklin 2001.  The Liberal Opposition missed more 2CPs (29) than they made (18) and were outpolled by One Nation (unprecedented) but are still the Opposition.  Worse than that they missed nine 3CPs as well and even managed to finish fifth in Port Adelaide and Black - Black being a seat they won at the previous election!  And so on.  It was obvious this was going to be a very messy election - a little while out I thought how on earth will we ever make a pendulum from THIS - but aspects of it were even more unique than I saw coming.

South Australia Postcount 2026: Finniss

FINNISS (Lib vs ALP 6.7%, Lib vs IND 0.7%)

David Basham (Lib) vs Lou Nicholson (IND) 

Nicholson wins from fourth position on primaries.  Unprecedented in state and federal elections

(Link to tallyboard thread)

The Victor Harbour/Goolwa seat of Finniss sees a similarly messy count to Kavel with four candidates with currently very similar primary votes, as I start this thread with the prepoll not yet in and sadly only 33.1% of enrolment counted.  It may be very different after prepoll and it was very different in 2022.  On the night Lou Nicholson was on 54.7% 2CP vs Basham and the doubt seemed to be would she make the final two or not.  She ended up making the final two but very poor numbers on prepolls and absents resulted in Basham winning (just) 50.7-49.3.  Now, the rematch ...

As with Kavel this is another seat where nobody has a quarter of the primary vote.  Currently One Nation's Greg Powell (23.6%) leads Basham by six votes, with Nicholson on 20.5% and Phoebe Redington (ALP) on 17.6%.  The Greens have 7.2% and the top of the ballot paper, and have recommended preferences to Nicholson.  The others are Bron Lewis (a tealish sounding independent on 4.3%), Animal Justice 1.6%, Aus Family 1.2% Fair Go 0.4%.  

South Australia 2022: Messy Postcounts (Waite, Finniss, Hammond)

Expected final result LABOR 27 LIBERAL 16 IND 4

On this page: Waite (assumed Labor win vs Holmes-Ross (IND), exclusion order issues.)

On this page: Finniss (Liberal expected to defeat IND, either by exclusion order or on 2CP. )

On this page: Hammond (assumed Liberal win)

On this page: Flinders (assumed Liberal win)

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General update 30/3: All seats have been determined now with the result at 27-16-4.  As Hammond is now showing as a 2PP I am assuming it as well as Waite finished as 2PP contests while Finniss and Flinders did not, but I am awaiting confirmation of that.  

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Welcome to my SA 2022 post-counting coverage.  The result of the election was a win to Labor with about as many seats as polling-based seat models predicted, but the downside for the Liberals in terms of losses to independents appears to be on the high side.  As well as the expected wins by Dan Cregan in Kavel (a massive win) and Fraser Ellis in Narungga, they have lost to Geoff Brock in Stuart.  That leaves two seats that are the subject of this thread - Finniss (where they may lose to a new independent) and Waite, where the ex-Liberal independent Sam Duluk seems to be doomed but it's not at all clear that the Liberals will get the seat back.  This is the thread for messy, interesting post-counts, and I also have one up for the vanilla postcounts and the Legislative Council (which currently seems to be tracking towards 5 Labor, 4 Liberal, 1 Green and a battle between One Nation and the reborn Family First for the final seat (or maybe LDP but they have form for dying on preferences.))