6:03pm – When I wrote this morning’s post we didn’t know what the final pre-poll count. In the end 6920 people voted on the last day, for a total of 43,684 across the entire voting period. This compares to 44,015 in 2019, so it’s a very slight decline, but will likely be a larger proportion of the total when you factor in a likely decline in turnout.
Polls have just opened in the federal seat of Eden-Monaro in south-eastern New South Wales.
I will be back to cover the results tonight, although coverage will be light until after 8pm.
I wrote about the trends in early voting at the beginning of the week.
Ben is joined by Stewart Jackson from the University of Sydney to preview this weekend’s federal by-election in the seat of Eden-Monaro.
We’ve entered the last week of early voting before this Saturday’s by-election in the south-east NSW seat of Eden-Monaro. We have quite a bit of data about who is casting an early vote, and it tells us that there has been a big increase in postal votes, but it looks like the increase in pre-poll votes will only be slight.
Western Australia is on track to lose the sixteenth seat it gained at the 2016 election. This will trigger a redistribution before the next election, and will have knock-on effects across the state.
Only one of Western Australia’s 16 electorates has enough voters to still be above-quota once the seats are reduced to fifteen, and that one seat sits quite far above the quota.
There was a story in the Sydney Morning Herald last week about how the NSW state government is considering a switch to postal voting for all voters at the 2021 local council elections.
These elections were originally scheduled for September 2020, but were postponed by twelve months in the hope of avoiding the pandemic.
I have been meaning to write a post about the impending determination and possible solutions to the likely merger of the NT’s two federal seats.
South Australia is currently undergoing a redistribution of its state electoral boundaries. The redistribution kicked off late last year, with the first round of submissions closing in April.
The Commission has released current population figures as of February 2020, and projected electors as of June 2022. Each electorate is required to fall within 10% of the average.
The next redistribution for NSW state electorates has just kicked off, with boundaries due to be redrawn for the 2023 state election.
The first stage of the process allows anyone to make submissions suggesting electoral boundaries, either making suggestions about a particular seat or the entire state. Suggestions are open from last Monday, 1 June, until 1 July.
