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.