As a follow-up to yesterday’s post, I’ve gone through the last two regions.
Labor has won four seats in South Metropolitan (along with one Liberal) and their preferences are pushing the Greens over the top for the fifth seat, but only by a slim margin over the Liberal Democrats.
Ben is joined by William Bowe of the Poll Bludger to discuss Labor’s massive landslide victory in yesterday’s Western Australian state election, including running through each of the six upper house contests.
In this post I run through the current state of the estimated preference distributions for four of the six upper house regions. I’ve run out of time to analyse the last two (South Metropolitan and South West) before my podcast recording timeslot so I will return to those tonight.
The result in the lower house in yesterday’s Western Australian state election was overwhelming and shows how the single-member voting system can produce massive lopsided majorities when a party wins big.
6:58pm – In Kalgoorlie, which the Liberal Party holds by a 6.2% margin, the Labor vote is up by 26.3% off four booths.
6:57pm – In Darling Range, where Labor won in 2017 before losing the 2018 by-election, the Labor primary vote is up by about 9% compared to the 2017 victory, with four booths reporting. Looks like a Labor gain or retain, depending on how you define it.
It’s now 8am in Western Australia, and polls have just opened for election day. We’re expecting a record low proportion of Western Australian voters casting their vote on election day, thanks to record numbers of pre-poll and postal votes.
Election day is tomorrow in Western Australia.
We haven’t had any more proper polling since the Newspoll three weeks ago which gave Labor 68% of the two-party-preferred vote. Overall, we haven’t had much polling for this election. It’s quite likely that 68% poll is an outlier, but we don’t really have much else.
Western Australia is the last place in Australia where the voting system strongly pushes voters into casting a vote which hands total control of preferences over to the party who receives that vote, by imposing voting rules that make it difficult to break out.
Australia has a long history of electoral systems that slant the playing field in favour of particular ideological positions, favouring certain voters over others. Limiting the vote to people with property was common in the mid-19th century, and survived in some upper houses well into the 20th century.
It was also very common for rural electorates to be drawn with smaller populations than urban electorates, or for boundaries to be left unchanged as urban populations boomed.
We return to the WA election today, with Ben joined by the ABC’s Jacob Kagi and the University of Sydney’s Stewart Jackson, who discuss the campaign and what to look out for on election night.