How Should We Solve The Problem Of Unintended Informal Voting?

Advance Summary

1. In single-seat elections using compulsory preferential voting, high rates of unintended informal voting occur.

2. Informal voting is especially high where there are many candidates, where there is confusion between voting systems, and where electoral and/or English language literacy are low.

3. It is unclear whether unintended informal voting creates a significant two-party preferred advantage for one side of politics, although it appears to deflate Labor's primary vote.

4. There are many ways to reduce the number of votes that are disqualified without having to adopt Optional Preferential Voting.

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Rolling Poll Roundup And Seat Betting Watch: The Final Days

2PP Aggregate 51.5 to Labor (by last-election preferences) (-0.3 since last week)
51.1 with One Nation adjustment
Current seat projection approx Labor 79 Coalition 66 others 6 assuming polls accurate.

The end, it seems, is nigh.  If the (ludicrously herded) national polls are right, the Morrison government would need a huge amount of luck to survive a swing of somewhere around 1.3-2.3%, at an election at which it can afford perhaps two net seat losses.  If the polls on the whole are just modestly wrong in one direction, the Government's chances of survival improve greatly, but the other direction leads to a decisive loss.  The most likely path to survival is a Donald Trump style path - a combination of a modest national polling error and a fair amount of luck with the local breakdowns, but if it happens in this case, after everything, it will be very surreal.

Poll Roundup: Make Newspoll Preferences Great Again!

2PP Aggregate: 51.9% to Labor (last election preferences) (-0.5 since last week)
51.6% with One Nation adjustment
Labor is still winning, but at present polls imply only a modest majority (c. 80 seats) 
Betting markets don't think it's that close

I didn't put out a Poll Roundup last week because there were no major polls.  This week there is a lot more to discuss, starting with United Australia.

UAP Surge - Is It Real?  

After languishing at around 1% in those polls that included them until not long ago, Clive Palmer's United Australia Party has made major inroads in polling in the last month, helped by problems for One Nation, which is not running in every seat anyway.  At the current level, team yellow (unless you're in Tasmania where there are two team yellows) isn't threatening to win Reps seats, but it looks very competitive for the Queensland Senate at least.  That said, media are overplaying the value of the very useful Coalition preferences there, since the Coalition might not get that much over two quotas given the added competition from UAP, and only 30% or so of its voters will follow the card anyway.  The surge is being linked to Newspoll switching to including UAP as a distinct option in its results, which is being interpreted as the party being added to the readout (something which has been thought to overestimate minor party votes).

Poll Roundup: Well-Received Budget Yields A Kitten-Sized Bounce (Maybe)

2PP Aggregate: 52.5 to Labor (2016 preferences) (-0.5 in a week)
(51.9 with One Nation adjustment)
Labor would win election "held now", with seat tally around the low 80s

Equal best polling position for Coalition under Morrison so far
Budget reception among the best ever in some regards, but not all
Weak evidence that there may have been a "Budget bounce" of around half a point, but impossible to confirm

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The 2019 Budget has been delivered with the election expected to be called sometime in the next week.  This year's budget was in most ways well-received, although the voters have not bought the Government's attacks on the ability of the Opposition to deliver the same thing.  There was remarkably little polling in the leadup to the Budget, so it's hard to say for sure if we have seen that rare creature the Budget bounce or not, but if we have seen it, it's probably only a little one.  We can't yet reliably conclude that the modest move to the government this week is caused by the Budget at all as opposed to other factors.  As it isn't statistically significant, it may even just be random noise.

Seat Betting Improves, But Still No Miracle, At The 2016 Federal Election

Advance Summary

1. Seat betting markets, sometimes considered to be highly predictive, returned another modest result at the 2016 federal election, predicting thirteen seats incorrectly.

2. Seat betting markets did however improve as a predictor of total seat wins compared to the 2013 election, at which they greatly overestimated the Coalition's winning seat margin.

3. Seat betting markets also performed impressively in their predictions of "non-classic" seats, getting only one (Cowper) wrong.

4. Overall the predictions of seat betting markets were extremely similar to those of poll-based projections.

5. Large swings to Labor in outer suburban and low-income seats, generally missed in public seat polling, gave seat betting markets an opportunity to show superior insight.

6. That chance was, however, generally missed, showing that seat betting displays no superior insights.

7. In terms of seat totals, individual seat markets again showed no notable insights, and were again outperformed by betting markets dealing specifically with the number of seats won.