Time for a new thread, so here’s some very scattered thoughts that it occurs to me to share at this late hour:
• I had a piece on the Senate result in Crikey yesterday, and have been keeping a low profile on Poll Bludger in part because I’ve been busy fielding inquiries from media outlets eager to hear an election wonk’s take on the whole affair. If you’d like to comment on the progress of late counting in the Senate I’d encourage you to do so on the dedicated thread, or at least re-paste your comments there after leaving them on this one.
• I’d also like to encourage those with particular insights to offer on late counting in close lower house seats to share the love in the relevant comments threads, which can serve as useful clearing houses for information for those of us trying to keep up. Note that these posts can be accessed through links near the top of the sidebar.
• So what the hell happened in Fowler? There was, as we know, a much milder swing against Labor in western Sydney than media hype and certain local opinion polls had primed us for. However, that scarcely explains the thumping 8.8% swing enjoyed by Labor journeyman Chris Hayes. What presumably does explain it is Liberal candidate Andrew Nguyen, chosen by the party with a view to snaring the Vietnamese vote in Cabramatta, who suffered swings approaching 20% in that very area. As to what Vietnamese voters might have known about Nguyen that the Liberal Party did not, I cannot even speculate. However, it won’t be the only question the party has to ask itself about its candidate selection processes in New South Wales, for the second election in a row.
• It wasn’t a very good election for Bob Katter, who failed in his bid to bring new allies to Canberra and had his seemingly impregnable hold on Kennedy cut to the bone. One reason of course was that he was squeezed out by Clive Palmer (with due apologies for the unattractiveness of that image). However, another was very likely a preference deal he cut with Labor which in the event did neither party any good. I would also observe that this is not Katter’s first failed attempt at empire-building. At the 2004 Queensland state election, Katter organised an alliance of independents with a view to activating discontent over sugar industry policy, and the only one to poll a substantial share of the vote had done nearly as well without Katter’s help at the previous election. Even the much-touted successes of Katter’s Australian Party at last year’s Queensland election involved it a) absorbing probably transient protest votes which formed part of the huge swing against Labor, and b) electing two members who could just easily have won their seats as independents. Katter’s constituency would evidently prefer that he stick to being an independent local member, and limit his broader ambitious to bequeathing the family firm to his son.
• As well as witnessing an explosion in the micro-party vote, the election has at the very least seen the rate of informal voting maintain the peak scaled at the 2010 election. Limiting it to ordinary election day votes to ensure we’re comparing apples with apples (pre-poll and postal voters being generally more motivated and hence less prone to informal voting), the informal vote rate has progressed from 4.18% to 5.82% to 5.92%. Presumably the Australian Electoral Commission will be conducting a ballot paper study to let us know how much this is down to proliferating candidate numbers leading to inadvertent mistakes, and how much to disaffection leading to deliberate spoilage of ballot papers.
• If I do say so myself, my BludgerTrack poll aggregate performed rather well. The Coalition’s two-party preferred vote is at 53.15% on current counting, which is likely to edge up towards the projected 53.5% as the remaining votes come in. Better yet, there’s a good chance the state seat projections will prove to have been exactly correct, allowing for the fact that the model did not accommodate non-major party outcomes such as the possible wins for Clive Palmer in Fairfax and Cathy McGowan in Indi. No doubt this is partly down to luck. There was some imprecision on the primary vote, with the Coalition about a point too low and the Greens about a point too high (though the model in fact scaled down the latter from the pollsters’ published results), with the circle being squared by a preference allocation method that proved over-favourable to the Coalition, based as it was on the 2010 election result (although I’m pretty sure it still performed better than a method based on respondent allocation would have done).
Nonetheless, the model was certainly successful enough to confirm the wisdom of its basic premise that the best way to read the campaign horse race is to a) only pay attention to large-scale polling, i.e. national and state-level results, b) adjust pollsters for bias according to their past performance where sufficient observations are available from recent history, c) instead use the pollster’s deviation from the aggregated poll trend where sufficient observations are not available, and d) weight the results of each pollster according to how historically accurate/consistent with the trend they have been. As to the performance of the polls themselves, I’ll have a lot more to say about that when all the votes are in. In the meantime, here’s a broad brush overview from Matthew Knott at Crikey.
Upon what grounds could Mirabella obtain an injunction? That the batch of votes in question was somehow unsupervised for a period, and therefore might have been interfered with?
I sat through an entire hearing of the Court of Disputed Returns in Victoria once, in relation to a tied vote in a state election, and I was very pleased to observe that commonsense, for the most part, prevailed.
@News2This
The election is over, time to start criticizing your ‘hero’.
zoomster
We parted ways before the election but I must say I admire your steadfastness and dedication. Good on you.
victoria:
I’m not confident either, thanks for the update. 🙂
zoomster
If you are looking for a possie, the Informal Party is always looking for enthusiasts.
[2598
New2This
Posted Wednesday, September 11, 2013 at 8:09 pm | PERMALINK
Oh and BTW Tony Abbott is Prime Minister… How many on Poll Bludger said it would never happen…
]
That’s a matter for the Governor-General. He is not yet Prime Minister.
Boerwar
There is a high chance of Hawks contesting the preliminary final against the Cats. We all know how that has turned out in the recent past. 🙁
The vote difference between the Sports Party and the other micros at relevant stages in the count is actually fairly large given the micros won’t do that well in later counting, which will tend to favour the major parties.
If the ALP vote went up 1% the ALP wouldn’t win the ‘last sea’t in WA because they’d have 2 quotas and then get the 4th seat.
Teddy Roosevelt?
If he were alive he would be certifiable. He wanted to raise his own division and take it off to win World War 1.
Power-besotted egomaniac.
victoria
The Hawks will thrash the Cats. The real problem will be the Dockers with their twin towers.
The AEC still hasn’t added those 1003 votes. I will sleep easier when they do. I don’t want to wake to a mistake that they made a mistake.
Or perhaps the delay in the AEC officially recording those 1,000 or so votes is that the AEC, under its own rules, has to conduct some sort of internal investigation first, to satisfy itself that the votes are not tainted? Something like that?
Darren Laver suck it up sunshine…
[2605
Boerwar
Posted Wednesday, September 11, 2013 at 8:12 pm | PERMALINK
zoomster
If you are looking for a possie, the Informal Party is always looking for enthusiasts.
]
I did not see this so called party on my ballot paper, or any others registered with the AEC.
Anyone would think you have been (and continue to) encouraging citizens to vote informally.
To whom should this be reported for further investigation?
Is Farrell’s SA seat definitely lost?
With the Tigers gawn I think its time to get with the Dockers virgin premiership
alias
‘Upon what grounds could Mirabella obtain an injunction?’
Plenty.
(1) The votes were left in a shed all by themselves.
(2) There were sufficient votes to overturn the outcome.
(3) If it could happen to these votes what else might have happened in the shed?
INDI: The missing votes did not turn up. It was a transcription error they box was recorded as having 1234 votes not 2134 votes or something similar. It was discovered when they did a comparison with the booth senate vote tally
The same error happened in Victoria Upper House count in 2006
It is also another reason why the AEC MUST publihs the BTL preference data-entry data-files. Transcription errors can be recorded in the Senate computerised counts
[2615
Psephos
Posted Wednesday, September 11, 2013 at 8:17 pm | PERMALINK
Is Farrell’s SA seat definitely lost?]
Certain posters have suggested it would be poetic justice if he was not returned given the Wong affair.
Boerwar
If the Hawks get to the GF, Freo will be a formidable opponent
K
The Dockers cheated by resting half the team and then cheated by punching, jumper punching etc, etc.
The spineless match review board let them get away with it because it was the finals. Gutless.
I do hope that if the Hawks meet the Dockers in the Grand Final that the Hawks get in the firstest with the mostest.
[lefty e
……Im not so sure about that: Batman and Melbourne will go very heavily against LNP; Denison moderately pro-ALP; Farifax and Fisher only moderately anti-ALP; the rest heavily LNP.
Cant see that lifting it higher that 53.5% myself.]
Well, you made me go an look into this now and waste an hour of my life!!!! :devil:
Having said that, you are probably right so it was worth doing.
By taking the current primaries (just ALP, Lib+Nat, Greens, Others) and applying 2010 preference distributions (80% Greens and 40% Others going to ALP) I get the following final TPP vote tallies:
ALP 5,120,472 46.7%
LNP 5,840,566 53.3%
The AEC vote counts dont include the postals and I think there are about a million votes left to count, and these votes go the LNP way usually, so your 53.5% guess is probably about right.
But, BoerWar, the votes had already been counted and scrutineered, had they not? Unless there is an actual well-founded allegation of interference, surely the working assumption is that the votes were properly counted and scrutinised?
[That’s a matter for the Governor-General. He is not yet Prime Minister.]
Maybe she’ll appoint Malcolm Fraser. It’s happened before.
P
I think it was written off fairly early in the piece. But I don’t know for sure.
alias
You obviously don’t know what happens in sheds.
BW
Were the votes secured in the shed?
Were the votes needs attended to in the shed?
Are the votes relatives becoming litigious?
Boerwar
Hope so too. Cant bear to see son and OH moping about again this year!!
Boerwar
[Teddy Roosevelt?]
Until I worked with a couple of dreaded 457 visa peeps I was unaware of the, basically a crime against humanity, conduct of US Philippine war. Feck Teddy and the horse he rode in on.
v
*laughs muchly*
[Certain posters have suggested it would be poetic justice if he was not returned given the Wong affair.]
That wasn’t my question. But history will record that he voluntarily gave up a seat which he won fair and square in a democratic party ballot. Wong acknowledged that herself.
p
Yep.
[Psephos
Posted Wednesday, September 11, 2013 at 8:17 pm | PERMALINK
Is Farrell’s SA seat definitely lost?]
Very hard to work out the Senate so who knows!
He is excluded about 4 counts from the bottom and cant seem to get about 0.59 of a quota so I reckon, yes, hes gone.
Shock horror – Mod Lib caught our overestimated the LNP vote!
Maybe he/she should get a job for ReachTel polling marginal seats?
I think the Dockers do that every year. I have a memory of them sending a second 22 to tasmania late last year as well.
they haven’t been on the drugs but. gotta stand for something
[Well, you made me go an look into this now and waste an hour of my life!!!!
Having said that, you are probably right so it was worth doing.
By taking the current primaries (just ALP, Lib+Nat, Greens, Others) and applying 2010 preference distributions (80% Greens and 40% Others going to ALP) I get the following final TPP vote tallies:
ALP 5,120,472 46.7%
LNP 5,840,566 53.3%
The AEC vote counts dont include the postals and I think there are about a million votes left to count, and these votes go the LNP way usually, so your 53.5% guess is probably about right.]
Yeah I thought your figure looked a bit high. Thanks for bothering ML – I muts admit I was a bit curious myself, but I couldnt be arsed working it out 🙂
K
True.
Rafael Epstein, the host of the afternoon programme on ABC local radio in Melbourne, was making a song and dance today about the question of a possible perceived conflict of interset for the GG if Bill Shorten were to be Labor leader and down the track PM. He was emphasising the perceived conflict of interest angle – that it wouldn’t look too good if the GG were in position where she had to make a call in which her son-in-law might stand to gain or lose.
[Wong acknowledged that herself.]
she could stand down in his favour.
randal who, which one is he?
The distortion in the way the senate vote is counted could see Xenophon denied a second seat in South Australia losing out to the Liberal Party
Segmentation, Surplus Transfer Value and Droop quota all play a part in his down fall.
alias
OTOH, his mother-in-law might not like him all that much.
[Shock horror – Mod Lib caught our overestimated the LNP vote!
]
I of course meant: “caught out overestimating…”
B
True
shed or dockers?
Pell is Shortens mother in law?
K
Dockers not being into ‘sports supplements’.
2607
“There is a high chance of Hawks contesting the preliminary final against the Cats. We all know how that has turned out in the recent past”
I think most of these “hoodoos” disappear in finals – hadn’t Collingwood beaten Sydney 10 times in a row in Sydney before last year’s prelim? As a neutral observer I think the bigger hoodoo may kick in (1989, 2008 big finals).
Addit to #2633:
The ALP#2 (Farrell) would need to get above SHY near the end and PUP is going SHY and will always be re-allocated before the ALP or Greens so I cant see the ALP getting ahead of the Greens and if they don’t they will always end up below Family First and Xenophon#2.
In other words, yes, I reckon Farrell is dead.
In terms of conflict of interest, if the GG is the Mother-In-Law of the LOTO, then the Prime Minister should resign in order not to place her in an individious position.
alias
Quentin Bryce will not be GG by the time of the next election. What is Rafael Epstein on about?
Every single News Ltd and Fox reporter has a conflict of interest. They should all do the decent thing and resign.