Voting closed last night for the Victorian local government elections. Ballot boxes will be opened today and votes will start to be counted.
I believe the deadline for declaring results is November 15, and we may not get any official figures before the declaration. I suspect there will be scrutineer reports and news stories, and you can discuss them here.
I won’t be doing any analysis prior to November 15, when we have proper data.
I have been watching the last week of counting in the ACT election, which eventually made it clear that the Greens’ Laura Nuttall would retain the final seat in Brindabella, despite her own party conceding defeat on election night, and that Liberal MP Ed Cocks would narrowly hold on against another Liberal in Murrumbidgee. I haven’t been able to actively post in part because I’m away on a family holiday.
Ben is joined by ACT historian Chris Monnox and Tasmanian psephologist Kevin Bonham to dig into the results of last weekend’s ACT election, looking at the narrative, the likely shape of the new government and the close races not yet called.
I’m pleased to report that, in the final week of voting for the Victorian council elections, I’ve now finished my guide to the 33 most populous Victorian councils, as originally planned.
6:00 – Polls have just closed for the Australian Capital Territory’s Assembly election, and for three state by-elections for the New South Wales seats of Epping, Hornsby and Pittwater.
A Labor-Greens coalition government will be attempting to retain its majority after 23 years of Labor rule and 16 years of the Greens in the balance of power.
The draft federal electoral boundaries for the Northern Territory were published earlier today.
This redistribution is far less dramatic than the redistributions for the three big states that have just concluded. For a start, there is no change to the seat count – the redistribution was triggered by seven years passing since the last redistribution and thus no mini-redistribution would be required if the process isn’t finished prior to the federal election.
Ben is joined by Andrew Messenger from the Guardian to discuss the final stretch of the Queensland election campaign. We spend most of our time going through the key seats in each region of the state, and the issues that have dominated the campaign.
The AEC released the final maps and data for the Victorian federal redistribution earlier today. In this blog post I’m going to post my final estimates of primary votes, two-party-preferred and two-candidate-preferred margins for each seat. At the end I’ve also posted the final pendulum after the completion of the redistributions in New South Wales, Victoria and Western Australia, although we have the draft boundaries for the NT redistribution due tomorrow.
Under Hare-Clark, a party’s total vote is not the only thing that matters for how many seats you win. In a close race, the relative distribution of votes between your candidates can make a difference.
The number of distinct electoral contests in Victorian councils has shot through the roof this year. There were 260 in 2016, 298 in 2020, and 465 this year, as the mandate imposing single-member wards across all large councils outside of the City of Melbourne has finished rolling out.