Photo finishes: Capricornia

This post will be progressively updated to follow the late counting in the undecided seat of Capricornia.

Saturday 8pm. The LNP lead is now 1033 after a further 2269 pre-polls and 2068 absents. Unless something comes up, I’m no longer going to be following this one.

Friday 6pm. Just ordinary vote rechecking today, which has cost Labor 87 and putting the LNP lead at 711. Still no pre-polls counted, but they went against Labor in 2010 so there seems little chance of them winning from here.

Thursday evening. Labor copped a pasting on postal votes, 4839 of which have boosted the LNP by 935, turning a 141-vote lead into a 624-vote deficit. There are still about 3000 postals to come, which at this rate seem likely to put Labor out of business. Postals likewise went heavily against Labor in 2010, the difference this time being that the number of them looks set to increase from around 6000 to 8000. Labor can hope to do better from around 3000 absent votes, but 2000 oustanding pre-polls are likely to go against them.

Election night. The ABC computer has a 3.6% LNP swing against a Labor margin of 3.7%. Labor’s Peter Freeleagus leads 35485 to 35345, which aligns with the AEC’s result having him 0.1% ahead. One of the pre-poll voting centres has somehow reported two-party preferred but not the primary vote, but otherwise it looks like a completed election night count.

Author: William Bowe

William Bowe is a Perth-based election analyst and occasional teacher of political science. His blog, The Poll Bludger, has existed in one form or another since 2004, and is one of the most heavily trafficked websites on Australian politics.

8 comments on “Photo finishes: Capricornia”

  1. The average post-count swing to Coalition last time would be enough to claim this one but last time it actually had a way above average post-count swing of 0.91% (one of the highest in the nation). I don’t know if this is likely to repeat but given that some other Qld seats had even bigger postcount margins last time, this could be nasty. I think that postcount swing issue is why there was argument about its fate last night.

    http://kevinbonham.blogspot.com.au/2013/09/2013-federal-election-late-counting.html

  2. What is interesting about this seat is that the ALP ran a coal miner from Moranbah, and it appears that the vote in Rockhampton has held but Moranbah has swung heavily against him.

  3. TheSpeaker@5

    Not sure why no one is interested in this contest. Closest in the country at the moment.

    21 vote lead now.

    Firstly there’s been nothing going on until today and secondly if you look at 2010 this was one of the Coalition’s best post-count seats in the nation with a 2PP gain of 0.91% from ordinary votes to final. Postals in 2010 favoured the Coalition by 11% more than the final count.

    So far they are doing more or less exactly the same thing. It’s close only because they’ve been slow and it’s very likely going to blow out bigtime.

    This is why the ABC was projecting this as 50.9-ish on the night while some people were trying to dispute it and claim it was still winnable. On what we’ve seen from postals so far the ABC was correct.

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