How To Make Best Use Of Your 2022 Senate Vote

People are starting to vote already (by post) so I thought I'd get a revised version of this guide up for this year.  It is largely copied from the previous one but I have made a few minor changes and dropped some no longer relevant content.   Many regular readers of the site will already be aware of many of the points below.  I hope the main part of the post will also be useful, however, for those who want to know what advice to give less politically engaged (or more easily confused) voters.  I will vote below the line and number every square, and I'm sure many other readers will too (at least in the smaller states!), but not everyone is up for that.

Under the system introduced in 2016, voters determine where their preferences go - there is no longer any "group ticket voting" in which if you vote for one party, your preference also goes to another.  Voters have great flexibility - they can vote above the line (in which case they are asked to number at least six boxes) or below the line (in which case they are asked to number at least twelve).  Voters who vote below the line are no longer forced to number all the boxes.  

This freedom is fantastic, but it's still taking some getting used to, and most voters are not using their vote in the most effective way they could.  If you don't have time to use your vote effectively and just want to get out of the polling box as fast as you like, that's fine, that's up to you.  But not making the best use of your vote might end up helping a party you can't stand beat one you are merely disappointed by.  This guide tells you how to avoid that, if you want to.   

Here I give some answers to the sorts of questions people are asking or likely to ask about the system.  At the bottom there is a section on tactical voting for advanced players only.  The vast majority of readers should stop when they get to that point.

Prospects for the 2022 Senate Election

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This is a general (and maths-heavy) piece giving assessments of the Senate contest in each state and territory and overall. A detailed Senate guide for Tasmania will be released soon after the announcement of nominations for the state.  Firstly, a look at which Senate seats are up for grabs at this election and which are continuing until 2025 (barring a double dissolution):

The ACT and NT seats are recontested every election.  At present the Coalition is three short of a majority and can pass legislation supported by Stirling Griff, Rex Patrick and Jacqui Lambie, or by any one of these plus One Nation.  The ability to block enquiries, motions and disallowances in the Senate is also very important and here the Coalition and One Nation have a "blocking majority" of exactly half the seats.  

2018 SA Election Late Polls And Other Comments

SA: Newspoll and ReachTEL 34-31 on primary votes to Liberal
No predicted winner - too close to call

On Saturday night I will be attempting to live-comment the SA state election and the federal Batman by-election at the same time starting from 6:30.  Really this shouldn't be too hard, since Batman is just one seat, so I hope it will be useful.  They will be on separate threads and I will be trying to give each about equal attention to start with, though if Batman can be called quickly I will wind it down and switch to focusing purely on South Australia.

SA Election: Some General Modelling Comments

Note to media of all kinds: this long weekend (10-12 March) I am not available for in-person interviews.  My phone will be switched off most of the long weekend - you may be able to get me on Saturday morning or Monday night, or if you leave a message with an after-hours number I may be able to return your call at night on Saturday or Sunday.

Note to posters: Comment clearing may be slow and replies slower for the next few days.

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The two-week gap between this year's Tasmanian and South Australian elections means I will at least be able to do live comments on South Australia.  However, the Tasmanian campaign hasn't done wonders for my ability to devote energy to the SA contest.  I may be able to do another piece with more detailed modelling on South Australia next week, but I'm not sure I will have time for this yet.  This piece just makes a range of general comments that I think are important to trying to model the outcome.

Horse-Race Overview And Betting Roundup: Are Labor Too Long?

(Note: This post was actually released 23 June, not 18 June as for some strange reason stated!)

It's just about time to rule a line under the rolling poll roundup that I ran through the last several days and write something new about the overall horse-race picture.  A new rolling roundup will be started when there is a new national poll (most likely ReachTEL on Friday night).

The national polling data that we have on this election at the moment all dates from Sunday or earlier.  Only Newspoll is even dominated by data from last weekend.  The two-party picture is persistently close, and the Coalition's advantage in seat projections is not massive, but betting markets offer headline odds that imply it's almost a done deal.  Many people have suggested to me over the last few weeks that Labor are way too long, and that odds of $3 or $4 might be understandable, but surely not $6 and upwards as has been seen at times.

My own polling aggregate (which, I should restate, describes the state of play at a given time - it is not by itself a prediction) has found the Coalition to be in a winning position at all times since Malcolm Turnbull became Prime Minister.  The Coalition has sometimes slipped below 50% two-party-preferred, but has never yet fallen below 76 seats on my projection of what would happen in an election "held now" at the time.  However, it hasn't had a big lead for a long time.

Rolling Poll Roundup: ReachTEL vs The Rest?

2PP Aggregate: 50.3 to Coalition (ended last week at 50.6, week before 50.3)

Seat projection for this 2PP: probable Coalition majority (estimated 77-67-6)
(at time of starting this rolling roundup, aggregate was 50.7)

2PP aggregate tracking graph.  Last updated 21 June

As foreshadowed at the end of the previous session I've decided to put out a rolling poll roundup thread to cover the time from the new polls out on Friday night until at least the expected release of Essential on Tuesday.  Updates will be added at the bottom as new polls arrive.

As I write a difference between one poll, ReachTEL, and the other most recently released polls (Ipsos, Morgan and Essential) has developed.  ReachTEL had the Coalition at 50-50 2PP last week and 51-49 this week, using respondent allocated preferences, but if last election preferences are used both polls come out to about 52-48 to Coalition.  Meanwhile Ipsos, Morgan and Essential have all issued headline rates of 51:49 to Labor.  ReachTEL had the Coalition primary on 42.7 last week and 43.5 this week while Ipsos had it on 39 and Essential on 41.  We're still looking for Morgan's primary results and expect to find them somewhere between the black box of MH-370 and the sign that reads "Beware of the Leopard", but the Coalition was probably on 40 or less with them too.

Poll Roundup and Seat Betting Watch: National Poll Drought Edition

2PP: 50.3 to Coalition (same as end of last week, +0.5 in two weeks)
Coalition would probably win election if everyone voted now, probably with small majority (seat projection 78-67-5)

The 2016 federal election is underway! Prepoll voting has already started and we're just sixteen days away from the main game.  And yet, courtesy of a long weekend and perhaps media disinterest in splashing out on polls this time around, the evidence of what is going on in nationwide voting intentions is very limited indeed.  (We do have evidence of who is paying attention though.  Check out Morgan's very believable list of the most and least engaged electorates.)

For all that trendy stuff about how we're being swamped with polls, as I write we have just one national sample that is entirely less than one week old, and that will stop being true some time tonight.  Unless the overdue Morgan finally appears (which apparently it will sometime), we may be left with the infamously trend-averse Essential as the only poll with any data less than one week old until ReachTEL and Ipsos come along on Friday night.  The non-appearance of Newspoll this week makes this the first time since 1990 that the Newspoll brand has gone this late into a campaign before switching to weekly polling.

So if federal voting intention has changed significantly in the last week, we may well not even know. It doesn't seem like it has based on seat poll results and murmers from party insiders, but it's hard to tell which of these sources of knowledge is least reliable.

Polls ... you don't know what you've got til its gone! (I dislike that song, by the way.)

Poll Roundup And Seat Betting Watch: Fear Of A Hung Parliament Edition

2PP Aggregate: 50.2 to Labor (unchanged)
Seat projection for this 2PP: probable narrow Coalition win, not necessarily with majority (estimate 76-69-5)

As usual, this roundup is quite long so feel free to just read whichever bits interest you.

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It may as well be a recorded message: for the eighth (!) week in a row national 2PP voting intention has been around 50:50 and there has been no significant movement in the 2PP at all.  Excitable noises are made about moves of 1-2 points this way or the other in this poll or the other (typically by the media those polls are associated with) but it is all meaningless babble as nothing has actually happened.

This week Newspoll came out at 50:50 following four weeks of 51:49 to Labor.  Ipsos, which has tended to lean slightly to the Coalition but is bouncy because of its smaller sample size than other pollsters (and lack of artificial bounce-retardants, I suspect) raised the odd eyebrow with a 51:49 to Labor (by both kinds of preferences).  Essential went to 50:50 after being 51:49 to Coalition last week and ReachTEL went to 50:50 as well.  The two-point move in ReachTEL was mostly caused by volatility in their respondent-preference sampling; by last-election preferences the Coalition improved by only 0.7 points.

Poll Roundup And Seat Betting Watch: Preferred Pet-Sitter Edition

2PP Aggregate: 50.1 to Labor (-0.1 since end of last week)
Coalition would probably win with a slight majority if election were "held now" (projection 78-68-4)
No significant move in voting intention detected in past seven weeks

In this edition:
Seventh straight week of no 2PP action
Old Newspoll's Queensland problem
Is Nick Xenophon Channeling Terry Pratchett?
Bill Shorten, Preferred Pet-Sitter
Corangamite seat poll
Punters Vs Polls - A False Dichotomy (For Now)

(Note: these roundups get pretty long, so feel free to just read the bits that interest you! I hope to have a detailed preview for the five Tasmanian seats up sometime this coming weekend)

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How Many Lower House Seats Can The Xenophon Team Win?

Note: For links to updated analysis re NXT written since this article, scroll to the bottom.

I have had a fair few questions about the Nick Xenophon Team (NXT) and their seat prospects for the Lower House in South Australia, because my seat projection nationwide still shows only four seats for Others.  This rather dry and mathsy piece (about Wonk Factor 3/5) explains my initial attempts to model what sort of vote NXT needs in South Australia, all else being equal, to win one or more of the 11 Lower House seats in the state.  These are very broad-brush attempts that don't take account of candidate factors, because until there is specific seat-polling we don't know anything objectively about how well (or badly) specific NXT candidates are going to campaign or be regarded.  Comments based on detailed local knowledge are welcome.

In summary, I estimate that NXT probably need a statewide vote in the very high teens to win seats.  Once they get well over 20 they start to win multiple seats, and something in the mid-20s could result in spectacular seat gains that would make a national hung parliament quite likely.  However there's no reason yet to believe those higher votes will actually happen, based on what little current public polling of the NXT vote exists.

Some Recent Senate Polling And Related Claims

This article assumes, for the sake of analysis, that the Senate election will be a double-dissolution under the new Senate system.  Neither of these things are yet confirmed, but both appear highly likely.  

I thought that there had been no polling at all of the Senate races yet, and innocently told a journalist so this week, but to my surprise reports of not one but two Senate polls have surfaced (one since I made that comment).  There are also many reports of an (apparently unpublished) Australia Institute analysis that claims that from five to nine non-Green crossbenchers could get up at a double dissolution, apparently based on commissioned Senate polling from ReachTEL and Research Now.  The Research Now (an online panel poll a la Essential) polling has been published but the main thing I can find on the ReachTEL is an AFR report from a month ago (!) that had somehow escaped my notice.

Poll Roundup And Seat Betting Watch: Labor Contesting The Lead

2PP Aggregate 50.1 to ALP (+0.7 in a week)
Coalition would still probably win election "held now" (seat estimate 77 Coalition 69 Labor 4 Others)
First ALP lead on my aggregate since Malcolm Turnbull became Prime Minister

In this issue:
A DD Is The Right Thing To Do
This week's polls
Leaderships
Issue Polls
Fishy Polls Of The Week
Seat Betting

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In another stirring triumph of tipping skills, a plurality of voters on my sidebar Not-A-Poll have correctly predicted that the Labor Opposition would recapture the 2PP lead on this site in March or April.  35.5% picked this, compared to 34.1% for May or June, 18.2% for not at all, and a dribble for various options that depended on a later election date. It's a trivially small lead, it's not an election winning lead, it's not being replicated by other aggregators yet, and it may not even last long enough to survive on the smoothed tracking, but it's still a big improvement on losing 54:46 just three months ago.

There is some rejoicing and a fair bit of schadenfreude on the left about the direction polling has moved in.  Many lefties seem amused that Malcolm Turnbull pulled a constitutional swifty to beef up his argument for a double-dissolution only to find himself in a position where it might not seem like such a great idea anymore.  With the rejection of the ABCC bill at the second reading the government has no obvious plan B; to welsh on the threatened double dissolution on account of indifferent or even bad polling would just make the PM a laughingstock.

Senate Reform Has Been Passed

It's all over bar the High Court challenge(s).  On Friday, the Commonwealth Electoral Amendment Bill 2016 finally passed both houses of parliament and was quickly whisked off to receive royal assent.

I've never been a fan of the now presumed-dead group ticket system, but my own campaigning to change it really dates from 30 August 2013.  On that day I discovered that the Family First candidate who had a dream run on the Tasmanian preference allocations, including from Labor, the Greens and various left micros, was an anti-gay extremist.  There was a high risk that socially progressive voters innocently voting above the line for their preferred parties would elect someone whose views would horrify them.  So I wrote this article.  In the end the disaster was avoided by just 821 votes.

I found it was uphill work convincing people to vote from 1 to 54 below the line (let alone the number of squares required in the larger states!) and that party operatives were concerned that I might cause their voters to vote informally.  Around the same time the Truth Seeker site was predicting Senate chaos with numerous micro-party wins based on tight preference flows between micro-parties.

What was most concerning, when the votes were finally counted, was not just that Truth Seeker had been right in a big picture sense, but also that the micro-parties that actually won or nearly won were frequently those that were not even on the radar of those trying to model the election in advance.  Trying to alert people to the consequences of their preference flows and do background checking on which micro-party Senators were going to win was a nightmare when not even expert modellers and not even preference whisperers could determine which micro-parties were going to get up.  Other results of the 2013 election showed that the system was not only absurd on a massive scale, but also a sovereign risk.  The voiding of the WA election would not have happened under the same circumstances but with voter-directed preferences.

Poll Roundup: Behind Longer Than Howard

2PP Aggregate: 53.1 to ALP (-0.3 in a week) 
Labor would comfortably win election held "right now"

Time for another federal polling roundup, with three polls out this week.  This week Morgan (which leans to Labor) moved from 54.5% 2PP in Labor's favour by last-election preferences to 53.5, Newspoll stayed at 54 and Essential curiously moved to 51.

This was the first time Essential has had a reading other than 52 or 53 since a cluster of 54s in January through March.  It's the first time it's made it down to 51 in one year and two weeks.  The reason is that last week's half of the sample was very poor for Labor, most likely as a result of random sample noise.  As a result of this, it's possible my aggregate is behind a few tenths of a point unkind to Labor at the moment; the picture should be clearer after next week's data.

After considering the primary votes and house effects I aggregated the Morgan at 52.7 to Labor, the Newspoll at 54.3 and Essential at 51.1.  With two polls saying things are getting better for the Coalition versus one influential one saying they are getting slightly worse, the net impact of all this is a 0.3 point recovery for the government, but one that I would not read anything into yet.  Here's the smoothed tracking graph:

Do Proposed Senate Reforms Advantage The Coalition?

(See also Would Senate Reforms Increase The Chance Of A Blocked Senate?)

Advance Summary

1. Concerns have recently been reported that the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters' proposed optional-preferencing Senate system may advantage parties other than Labor, especially the Coalition parties.

2. The reality is that Labor performs poorly under the current system and sometimes loses seats it deserves to win under it.

3. There is no historical, and no convincing theoretical, evidence that the Coalition loses more seats to micro-parties under the current system than Labor.

4. If anything there is some argument that the proposed changes improve the chances of Labor and the Greens acquiring at least a blocking majority in the Senate.

5. That argument, however, assumes that parties would attract the same vote shares under the new system, when the choice of that new system would actually discourage the scattering of much of the right-wing vote among a huge number of micro-parties.

6. All up there is no evidence that the proposed reforms disadvantage anyone, other than removing chances to be elected from micro-parties that don't deserve those chances anyway.

Labor And The Greens Shall Not Complain About Family First

(Update 1 Oct: Bob Day has been elected as expected.)

You'll see a lot of this sort of thing in the next six years if, as expected, Family First's Bob Day gets up in South Australia:

For those who don't know, Helen Polley is a Labor Senator for Tasmania, albeit a very "socially conservative" one.   Now, I have no problem with the proposition that there may be some real nutters in the seemingly soft and fuzzy Family First fold.  My open question then to Senator Polley is this:

If Day and Fielding are indeed so bad, why did your party preference both of them?