As of this morning, we have almost reached the end of the NSW council election count. It appears that all election day and pre-poll booths have been fully data entered, and they are just waiting for one more day of postal and declaration votes to be added.
This blog post will be used to track the close counts for the 26 big partisan councils. I’m going to be busy this week packing for a house move so won’t be doing big updates in one go, but I’ll update a council at a time when I get a chance.
If there is no time mentioned, assume the analysis is as of first thing Tuesday morning, September 17. There are 102 contests being tracked. 51 of those contests have an undecided seat, for a total of 62 undecided seats.
Ben is joined by Leo Puglisi from 6 News to analyse the results of the NSW local government elections.
This blog post includes a summary of the state of the race for the 27 councils with a population of 95,000 or more. The first few were also posted in the live blog overnight but for convenience I’ve included them here again.
I have a few summary thoughts first:
Campbelltown – 11:35 – The Liberal Party won four seats here last time, and their absence is keenly felt.
The Labor vote appears to have gone backwards by about 3%, and that may be enough for them to drop from seven to six seats, although it’s worth bearing in mind that the party has only held five seats for most of this term after the former mayor and an ally quit the party in early 2022.
Apart from Labor, you also have:
Polls have opened for election day for the NSW local government elections. I won’t be posting any analysis until after polls close at 6pm, but you can post your thoughts here.
The Australian Electoral Commission today announced the final decisions on boundaries for the NSW federal redistribution. As with the Victorian and Western Australian announcements last week, the AEC is yet to publish maps, digital boundary files or SA1 data.
Last week I wrote an analysis piece about the different shape of ballot papers in different parts of New South Wales – the urban areas and some large rural councils have above-the-line voting, small rural councils have a single column of ungrouped candidates, and there are some councils in between with a transitional mode.
I wanted to understand a bit more about below-the-line voting, at least in the places where a “line” exists.
If a council in New South Wales wants to change the number of councillors who sit on that council, they need to hold a referendum, with voters making the final decision.
Most candidates running in the NSW council elections are independents, or belong to the three big urban parties.
Over 58% of candidates running for the council election are either independent or unaffiliated. 14% of candidates were nominated by the ALP, 9.9% by the Greens, and 7.3% by the Liberal Party.
This leaves 435 candidates – 10.8% of the total – running for registered parties outside of those big three, and that’s the topic of this blog post.