10:00 – Hello and welcome. I’m going to be using this live blog to cover the declaration of nominations today.
At midday local time in each part of Australia, ballot draws will be conducted for the House of Representatives and the Senate. Nominations closed yesterday, but we don’t yet know who made the final cut. At the declaration, those names will be announced, each candidate will have a ball assigned to them in a lottery device, and then those balls will be drawn out.
By the end of today I expect the AEC to publish the final data for every seat, but it takes some time for the data from those 158 ballot draws to be centrally collated. So for this liveblog I’m going to take what I can find being reported and provide updates here.
I last updated my candidate list about 10 days ago, and since then I haven’t made any more changes. At the time Labor, the Coalition and the Greens were all around 130-140 candidates and I expect they will run in every seat. There were also 71 Family First candidates, 56 One Nation candidates and 37 Trumpet of Patriots candidates. Kevin Bonham has reported that it’s now more like 70 candidates on the ON and TOP websites. If history is a guide, many candidates will pop up at the last moment with no internet presence.
I won’t be attending a ballot draw, but if you go to one or see the results of a ballot draw reported, please send the info to me! You can post it in the comments, use the contact form, or contact me on Bluesky or Discord. Thanks!