In 2022 I wrote a blog post where I explained the phenomenon of the AEC needing to do more distribution of preferences before declaring election results, and thus needing longer to complete this process. We now have updated information for 2025, and can see that this process has become even more complex this year. When you look at how this has changed over two decades, it is a remarkable transformation.
For today’s blog post, I thought I’d wrap up the remaining urban teal contests in Sydney and Perth.
For today’s booth map we’re staying in Melbourne but heading slightly south-east, to look at the two incumbent teal MPs in Melbourne: Zoe Daniel’s seat of Goldstein and Monique Ryan’s seat of Kooyong. Daniel was defeated in Goldstein, while Ryan narrowly held on in Kooyong.
Ben was joined by Kevin Bonham to run through the close seats and the Senate race that have dragged out, one week after the election.
Throughout this week, and perhaps the next, I will be posting booth maps for interesting seats, or clusters of seats. I will be doing this while also tracking the election results as seats continue to be called. But these maps generally just show the ordinary election day votes, so shouldn’t change much, outside of corrections.
The House of Representatives contest has been a very comfortable win for Labor, and this has also been reflected in the Senate.
One of the biggest deciding factors in the Senate is whether either the left or right can win a “4-2 split”, where their side can win four out of six. Almost all elections are 3-3 splits, although there are some senators (such as Jacqui Lambie) who don’t fit into the two sides.
4:05 – Monique Ryan’s projected lead in Kooyong has shrunk from about 900 votes on Monday evening to just 405 today.
4:02 – In Bullwinkel, Labor’s projected lead has grown from 467 to 608 with more absent and pre-poll votes expected and very few postal votes left to count.
The Australian Electoral Commission has now started publishing three-candidate-preferred counts for some electorates where the final two are not clear. They have published seat-level totals for a series of seats at this page, but these seem to be not quite as advanced as the numbers I’ve seen.
For tonight’s update, I’m going to first touch on the races I included in this morning’s post and how they have changed. Those are the seats that are conventional close races.
Then I will turn my focus to the seats where the two-candidate-preferred count has been recalibrated to a different pair of candidates. In these seats there has been some significant progress today towards resolving these seats.
At the time of writing on Monday evening, there appear to be 17 close seats worth following over the next few days.
By my reckoning there are three types of seats worth watching: