We’ve made some more progress yesterday, and I believe we can narrow this list from nine to seven seats today.
As a reminder, the first four columns of data in this spreadsheet represent the AEC’s official data on how many votes are left to be processed in each category (bearing in mind that pre-poll and absent numbers are expected to grow).
Seat summary
The Senate data published on election night was very messy.
For a start, it didn’t make any effort to distinguish above-the-line and below-the-line votes, instead throwing all votes for each group into one pile.
Quite a bit of counting took place yesterday.
Yesterday we narrowed the list of seats to watch from 17 to 12, and today I think we can narrow that list to nine.
Seat summary
I’m ready to call Melbourne Ports for Labor and Grey and Dunkley for the Coalition. At the moment there are five seats which are extremely tight, and the rest look likely to break 72-68-5.
The seat categories are:
We saw a small amount of counting yesterday, but we should be able to narrow the list of undecided seats.
When I last posted, I listed 17 seats as in some doubt. This included 13 conventional Labor-Coalition races, plus Grey and Cowper, where we were waiting on a two-candidate-preferred count, Melbourne Ports where Labor is at a small risk of coming third and losing the seat, and Batman which is a reasonably conventional Labor-Greens race.
Seat summary
There’s been a lot of arguments coming out suggesting that Pauline Hanson and the rest of her team are only contenders for seats thanks to the Senate voting reforms, and the double dissolution.
Clearly a double dissolution made it easier for all small parties, including One Nation, and you can argue that a double dissolution was made possible thanks to Senate voting reform (although it wasn’t necessary to do both).
I have a list of sixteen seats which I think are close enough to pay further attention over the next few days as more votes flow in.
In this article I want to explain what data we will be receiving which will help us project forward in each electorate and hopefully narrow the number of undecided seats.
Firstly, apologies for the technical problems last night. I hope that readers were able to follow my commentary as part of the Guardian liveblog. In future if I’m participating in a liveblog somewhere else I’m not going to try and keep my own liveblog going here – I’ll just refer people to that better service. But I will look at technical improvements.
In addition to updating this liveblog here, you can also follow my commentary on Twitter or at the Guardian liveblog.
Polls open on the east coast in fifteen hours. I thought I might open up a quick post to allow commenters to post general comments about the election.
If you have predictions feel free to post them below.
I have had a number of articles up at the Guardian in the last few days.
