6:53 – The vote for Craig Garland has dropped to 16.4% after nineteen booths, which suggests his primary vote will be crucial to deciding the outcome. On the two-party-preferred vote there has been a swing of 1.8% to Labor’s Justine Keay, suggesting she is the favourite to win.
6:34 – Just after posting I saw a second booth has reported. Garland’s vote is down to 20%.
Polls have now opened in three of the five Super Saturday by-elections, and polls will open in Western Australia in just over an hour.
Feel free to use this post as an open thread to discuss the day. I’ll be back with another post for the results at 6pm AEST.
I’ll be at a friend’s wedding tonight so will only be posting intermittently. Don’t expect me to be first with the latest booth. Quality over quantity will be my approach tonight.
The AEC publishes daily updates of how many people have voted pre-poll, and have requested a postal ballot (which is not strictly the same as someone voting), and you can use this data to get a sense of the rates of early voting.
I’ve been steadily posting one seat guide every day. This week I’ve been posting guides to the respective Senate races, and then hopefully I’ll follow those up with federal Victorian seat guides (although I may need to post a few Victorian state seats to bridge the gap) but I’ve decided to prioritise one seat which has been in the news.
I was recently alerted to a new source of data on the AEC website. The AEC has always published the distribution of preferences at the seat level, as well as a more detailed dataset showing the flow of preferences from each candidate’s primary votes to the two-candidate-preferred count. They have now published this data at the booth level. This means you can see how many votes in each booth flowed to other candidates as the count progressed.
The final boundaries for the ACT were released today. There was one small change on the Bean/Canberra boundary in the Woden Valley area, where the remainder of the suburb of Phillip was moved from Canberra to Bean. This made no change to the margin.
I’ve now published the final ACT map, as well as the final Victorian and South Australian election maps, and you can download them all from the maps page.
In this episode I’m joined by Maiy Azize and Kevin Bonham. We preview the by-elections in Braddon, Fremantle and Perth, and discuss how we name electorates in light of Batman being renamed. In the news segment we discuss the results of the Darling Range by-election and begin the conversation about single-seat polling (sure to be revisited).
The AEC announced its final decision for the Victorian federal redistribution on Wednesday. That day I published my new estimates of the margins, and I’ve now also finished my map of the new electoral boundaries.
Yesterday’s by-election in the Perth seat of Darling Range was undoubtedly a disappointment for Labor, with a swing of 9% after preferences, producing a reasonably comfortable victory for Liberal candidate Alyssa Hayden.