Tuesday, December 9
8.20pm. The VEC confirms Greens victory in Prahran by 261 votes.
8pm. In keeping with my unblemished record of getting everything wrong this week, reports are emerging from all over the place that the Greens are in fact receiving around 88% of preferences, with some sources saying they have in fact won the seat by 128 votes. Labor is calling for a recount • as Kevin Bonham notes, if such a recount overturned Labor’s 38-vote deficit against the Greens at the second-last count, it would likewise overturn their 25-vote deficit against the Liberals in the final count.
5.45pm. Courtesy of Eleanor Bloom on Twitter, we learn that the preference distribution in Prahran has seen Labor drop out at the second last exclusion with 9953 votes to Greens candidate Sam Hibbins’ 9991. Had it been otherwise, the notional two-party count tells us that Labor’s Neil Pharoah would have fallen short by just 25 votes – 18,580 to 18,555. It now stands to be established whether the preferences of Pharoah and all other candidates enable Hibbins to overcome Liberal member Clem Newton-Browne. He will need 85.7%, and while he will doubtless get a very large majority of them, this seems too much.
Prahran:
17,097 – Clem Newton Brown (LIB)
9,991 – Sam Hibbins (GRN)
9,953 – Neil Pharoah (ALP)
Hibbins needs 85.7% of Labor preferences
Monday, December 8
The anticipated Prahran preference distribution today has instead been put off for tomorrow as a few outstanding postals and provisionals are finalised. The last skerricks in Frankston are being cleaned up, amounting to 24 votes today, and with Labor 334 votes in the lead it is clear they have won here. So Prahran is the only question mark. That makes the overall score 47 seats for Labor, 38 for the Coalition, one each for Greens and independents, and one in doubt. I’ve changed the time stamp on this post to put it at the top of the page, in anticipation of potential excitement from Prahran tomorrow.
Close of Friday night.
Short version: Labor has bolted down Bentleigh, Carrum and probably Frankston besides, making for a clean sweep of the sandbelt four, and Prahran remains as fascinating as ever, with the issue to be determined on Monday.
Prahran. This remains the big excitement of the late count, with the full preference distribution to determine the issue on Monday and the outcome between Liberal, Labor and the Greens anyone’s guess. The Liberal-versus-Labor count appeared to be slipping away from Labor until today’s addition of 1076 absents, 529 provisionals and 223 pre-polls favoured them heavily, despite 226 postals going the other way. This count down the Liberal lead from 273 to just 41, but given only a handful of postals remain, that’s still likely to be enough unless an anomaly emerges during the preference distribution.
That result will be a moot point of the preference distribution leaves the Greens ahead of Labor, which will require them to close a 426-vote gap as the other candidates are excluded in turn. The strongest prospect by far for the Greens is the 827 votes for Animal Justice, who directed their preferences straight to the Greens and would presumably have had most of their supporters do so anyway regardless of what the card had said. However, the bar will be raised by the 278 votes of Family First, who invariably direct preferences to the Liberals but had a surprisingly high leakage rate to Labor in the area’s electorates at the 2013 federal election of around 40%. There are also three independents with 564 votes between them, none of whom registered how-to-vote cards, but will probably give the Greens a slight boost by virtue of expressing anti-major party sentiment.
If the Greens can indeed close the gap, it will come down to the known unknown of Labor’s preference split between the Greens and the Liberals, and whether Labor voters favoured the Greens more heavily than vice-versa.
Frankston. Provisionals have given Labor a handy fillip by breaking 294-202 in their favour, which together with small handfuls of other votes pushes their lead out from 255 to 336 and makes victory look extremely likely.
Bentleigh. Labor has claimed victory here as the last stages of the count continue to go its way, today’s progress consisting of 152 absents and 82 postals which have added 30 votes to the Labor lead, now at 387.
Carrum. The VEC finally got stuck in here today, confirming Labor’s victory with 8941 pre-polls, 2801 postals and 1983 absents paring back Labor’s lead from 1029 to 464, but still leaving more than enough intact to withstand whatever provisionals and the few outstanding postals might have in store.
Close of Thursday night.
Antony Green notes that there has been a spike in below-the-line voting in the upper house from around 4% to around 8%, so clearly we shouldn’t be taking those projections for granted. I haven’t updated my dedicated upper house post since Sunday, but will hopefully find time to do so over the weekend. On to the business at hand:
Prahran. The two-party count continues moving in the Liberals’ favour, with 2586 breaking 1320-1125 and 217 pre-polls going 106-100, which increases the Liberal lead from 72 to 273 and doesn’t leave too much outstanding. The issue of whether this is indeed the relevant result, or if the Greens will finish second ahead of Labor, will not be known until the final preference count is conducted.
Frankston. The first batch of 1760 absent votes were good news for Labor, breaking 852-732 their way, although this was blunted a little by 528 postals breaking 259-230 to Liberal. The net impact is a 91-vote increase in Labor’s lead to 255.
Bentleigh. A further 1446 absents and 312 pre-polls have broken 838-800 to Labor, increasing the lead to 357 and making a Liberal victory now look very unlikely.
Close of Wednesday night.
Prahran. This one is going right down to the wire, with 1550 absent votes (perhaps about three quarters of them) combined with re-checking and a further 2000 pre-polls and postals turning a narrow Labor lead of 14 into a Liberal one of 72. It’s still too close to call, but the trend of the count is favouring the Liberals – postals heavily so, absents very slightly. Outstanding postals will no doubt continue to favour the Liberals, so Labor’s best shot is a batch of absents coming in from a strong area for them.
I have throughout proceedings been failing to give due credence to how close the Greens are to finishing second, as the reported view in the Liberal and Labor camps had been that they would fail to do so. But with Labor’s lead on the primary vote is just 4928 to 4831, and the Greens sure to get a good flow of preferences from the 432 Animal Justice votes, I’m starting to wonder. This raises the question of whether the Greens would do better on Labor preferences than vice-versa, on which the historical record isn’t much guide, as you can see from discussion in this post’s comments thread. Given that the prospect of a Greens victory is still not being widely discussed, my guess is that scrutineers have concluded that enough Labor votes are leaking to the Liberals that they will fall short. Whatever the truth, Prahran clearly remains a very interesting contest.
Frankston. After the Liberals moved ahead at one point to a 60-vote lead, things have swung back to Labor somewhere along the line, who are up 734 on the count as recorded on Monday night while the Liberals are up only 510, so that Labor now has a lead of 164. The recent activity has included checking and the first sign of absent votes, of which 381 out of what should be about 2000 have been added to the count, breaking evenly between Labor and Liberal.
Melbourne. The Greens lead now stands at 849 after rechecking, some more postals and pre-polls and the first 748 absents, which is the last I’ll have to say on the subject.
Bentleigh. Rechecking and a further 1441 pre-polls and 404 postals have increased Labor’s lead from 298 to 319. The main outstanding item is around 2000 absent votes, which are very unlikely to turn things around.
Carrum. The VEC aren’t making a priority of this, the only action since election night being rechecking. This hasn’t extended to the published two-party result, which still puts Labor’s lead at 1029.
Close of Tuesday night.
Today’s count was dedicated to rechecking, causing much consternation among election watchers as the VEC chose to remove the existing numbers from its website and media feed and start from scratch. Among other things, this means the projections you can currently find on the ABC site are based on incomplete counts. The one noteworthy news today was Labor’s concession of defeat in Melbourne, notwithstanding that counting of a further 681 pre-polls caused the Greens lead to narrow by 37 votes to 644.
Close of Monday night.
Note the italicised updates that have been added for Bentleigh and Frankston in the entry below.
Monday 6.30pm.
Bentleigh. The VEC has counted 5565 early votes out of 6482 issued, which have broken 2715-2652 in favour of Liberal and narrowed the Labor lead from 610 to 547. Only about half of 4004 postals received have been counted, the first batch of which narrowed the lead by about 345. But there should also be at least 2000 absent votes, which slightly favoured Labor in 2010. Verdict: Labor ahead. END OF NIGHT UPDATE: Most of the outstanding postals have been counted – an extra 1795, pushing the count to 3893 received out of 4004, remembering that a few more should trickle in over the coming days. This batch is slightly less bad for Labor than the first, breaking 1022-773 and narrowing the lead by 249 to 298.
Frankston. A good day of counting for the Liberals here, who have pared the Labor lead back from 581 to 192. The counting has included 6357 out of 8067 pre-polls, and another 1532 postals to boost the total counted to 3391 out of 4257 received. It’s the postals that have been making the difference, collectively breaking about 1925-1465 to Liberal, while the pre-polls have gone about 3230-3125 in their favour. There should also be about 2000 absents, which favoured Labor in 2010, although the boundary changes may cause them to behave differently this time. Verdict: too close to call.
Melbourne. The counting of most of the postal votes late on election night (1933 out of 2424 received) took a big bite out of the Greens lead, breaking about 1190-745 in Labor’s favour. But the Greens are doing better on pre-polls, of which 4409 out of 8777 have been counted today, breaking 2224-2185 to Labor and reducing the lead from 545 to 506. Furthermore, Melbourne gets a lot of absent votes, which in 2010 broke over 54-46 the Greens’ way. Verdict: likely Greens win.
Prahran. Labor has recovered the lead with the addition of 6780 pre-polls out of 9718, breaking 3645-3135 their way and turning a 397-vote deficit into a lead of 113. There have also been 505 postals added to the primary but not the two-party count, which will presumably send things back the Liberals’ way a little (UPDATE: They have broken 302-203 to Liberal, and cut Labor’s lead to 14). But only a handful of postals will remain after this, and it’s these that put the Liberals back in the hunt. The issue should be decided by maybe 3500 to 4000 absents, which were slightly above average for Labor in 2010. Verdict: Labor ahead.
Shepparton. There has been talk of a tightening here, but that may have been before the addition of 12,066 pre-polls, which is more or less all of them, behaved very much like the election day votes. It’s been a hugely different story on postals, 711 of which have gone 46.3% to the Nationals and 16.9% to Sheed, compared with 35.1% and 34.2% on polling day. But postals in Shepparton are few, and that should be nearly all of them, leaving Sheed with a lead of 2221 (20137-17916). Verdict: independent win.
South Barwon. Pre-polls have bolted this down, opening the Liberal lead from 809 to 2302. Verdict: Liberal win.
Close of Sunday night.
The second batch of postals in Prahran behaved almost identically to the first, breaking 539-320 to Liberal and boosting with the lead from 178 to 397. History suggests the Liberals will need some sort of a buffer from postals to survive a reversal when pre-polls and absents are added. The rest of today’s activity involved sorting of absents and pre-polls in preparation for counting. Counting tomorrow will focus on Shepparton, Bentleigh, Frankston, Morwell and Ripon, together with Prahran.
Sunday 3pm.
The VEC has started counting 1000 postals in Prahran, which is the only counting that will be conducted today.
Close of Saturday night.
Listed below are seven seats which I plan to track in late counting. The ABC computer isn’t quite calling Ripon for Liberal or Carrum for Labor, but I’m going to. That leaves us with 45 seats for Labor, 29 for the Liberals, seven for the Nationals, one independent, and six doubtful. Adding in the leading parties in the doubtful seats, the result is Labor 47, Liberal 31, Nationals eight, Greens one, independents one. Note that Melbourne, where the Greens were claiming victory earlier this evening, is on the watch list, so I don’t regard it as established yet that they have indeed broken their lower house drought. Certainly it seems established now that they have fallen short in Richmond and Brunswick.
The outstanding vote totals assume there will be 62% more pre-polls than last time, based on the statewide total (the VEC does have electorate-level totals of votes cast, which I’m presently trying to track down); 6% more postals, based on the increase in statewide enrolment; and an increased or decreased number of absent votes based on the number of ordinary votes that were cast in the electorate. There are problems here in that the baseline figures are from different electoral boundaries, but it will have to do. One way or another, there are a lot more outstanding votes than we’re used to.
Bentleigh. Labor leads by 610 with 23,343 ordinary and 1920 postal votes counted. Estimated 9,922 votes outstanding, with the Liberals needing 53.1%.
Frankston. Labor leads by 581 with 20,655 ordinary and 1859 postal votes counted. Estimated 11,618 votes outstanding, of which the Liberals need 52.5%.
Melbourne. Greens lead by 545 with 20,010 ordinary 1933 postal votes counted. Estimated 15,497 votes outstanding, of which Labor needs 51.8%.
Morwell. Nationals lead by 818 with 23,341 ordinary and 779 postal votes counted. Estimated 16,908 votes outstanding, of which Labor needs 52.2%.
Prahran. Liberals lead by 178 with 18,958 ordinary and 1872 postal votes counted. Estimated 16,794 votes outstanding, of which Labor needs 50.5%.
South Barwon. Liberals lead by 809 with 21,016 ordinary and 1939 postal votes counted. Estimated 15,414 votes outstanding, of which Labor needs 52.6%.
Am I right in thinking that if GRN are favoured relative to ALP and jump into second then LNP will have a more comfortable victory because leakage from ALP to LNP will be higher than leakage from GRN to LNP ?
In Prahran
I’m not sure if all that much is known about the behaviour of Labor preferences when they divide between Liberals and the Greens. It’s happened a few times in NSW, but that was under OPV.
Did the stats at scrutineering my booth. 1 out of 50 Labor preferences were leaking to the Liberals. If Greens get in front of Labor it’s an easy win. Labor Scruits also didn’t bother checking minor party and independents splits. not much at all swinging Labor’s way.
It appears there’s been a slight rightward drift whilst I was asleep.
Bentleigh & Frankston have gone from Labor gains to doubtful.
Richmond is safe for Labor, and Melbourne is now in doubt for the Greens.
And Prahran has gone from Labor or Greens to Labor or Liberal.
Would be a huge embarrassment for the Greens not to get up in Melbourne after that exultant victory celebration last night.
Can you explain what’s happened in Prahran to put the Liberals back in the race? It seemed as if everyone had written off Clem Newton-Brown at the end of the night last night.
Rebecca – the only thing I can think of is that Fern preferences are leaking to the Lib.
Greens, not fern.
The VEC has the Liberal total 0.9% lower than the ABC?
Rebecca@7
Except me. 🙂 That said for some time last night the only path to a win I was holding open for him was that the Greens are second. What I think happened was that postals favoured him as they’d be expected to. Likely that means that with the remaining non-booth votes not including so many postals, Labor should rein in his lead – if they get into the top two. To do that I believe they’ll need to expand their primary lead over the Greens.
The ABC has turned off predictive software so are now showing the raw counts, but apparently they will not update at all today as the servers are being moved so the VEC figures are the right ones. The percentage counted in Prahran is less than 50%, so there is a lot more to come there.
Bugler@10
My belief is that the ABC site is projecting to take account of different seats having vastly different %s of vote counted.
damian@4
What sample size and what booth? The flow won’t be 98% in reality, whatever it is.
No updates today on the VEC site. Is that usual?
In Prahran a sample of ALP votes preferenced
Greens 48 instances
Liberal 2 instances
In the booth I scrutineered the Green preferences favoured ALP over Lib 10:1
If I gave you the raw numbers you could identify the booth
This was one many Prahran booths where Greens got a higher vote than ALP
One booth counted TPP Libs : Greens, my booth did ALP:Libs and the Booth Manager had been warned to expect Greens pressure over the TPP count, one scrutineer was threatened with being shown the door
I am expecting Prahran will be recounted next week
VEC spend Sunday asleep, as Saturday is a very long day, from 7am to 11pm
I handed out HTV at the Prahran prepoll and noted that the Liberal was very good at turning votes so Clem will stand up in pre-poll. The ALP president watched and winced at the lies slipping over his silvered tongue
[In Prahran a sample of ALP votes preferenced
Greens 48 instances
Liberal 2 instances]
Wow,you mean to tell me ALP voters didnt go for shooters and fishers, or country alliance??? :p
PUT REGISTERED TICKET VOTING IN THE BIN WHERE IT BELONGS.
leftye
I highly doubt either Country Alliance or Shooters and Fishers ran in Prahran, so it would have been extremely difficult to preference them.
I was counting whether ALP votes preferenced Lib or Green highest. Most followed the published ticket – sorry I can’t quantify that further
Keep half an eye on Brunswick – in 2010 there were colossal differences between the early-vote ALP-Green 2PP in that seat and the on-the-day ALP-Green 2PP (anyone know why?)
If these strange differences were repeated this time with the on-the-day swing (which they in my view almost certainly won’t be) the Greens would actually just win the seat. Michael McCarthy pointed this stuff out to me on Twitter.
These differences existed to a much smaller degree in Melbourne (which I’m thinking will seal the Greens’ victory in the seat) and Richmond (nothing further to see there.)
VEC about to start counting 1000 postals in Prahran, which will be the only actual counting conducted today.
When talking about who comes second and who comes third in Prahran we should remember that Family First (who got less that 1%) is preferencing the Coalition (and the ALP candidate is not exactly going to be drawing all that many preference defectors), the Animal Justice Party is preferencing the Greens (I suspect most of their voters will stick to that) and the other 3 candidates did not register HTVCs (and got less that the Family First Candidate). And are likely to go everywhere.
This means the Greens should be able to claw back a primary vote deficit of at least 100 votes, if not more.
Kevin Bonham @23
It might sound a bit odd but there were a couple of relatively big “bush doofs” on election weekend 2010. The scene tends to be hippy/green but not sure if that would explain a large number of early-votes. If it is an influence it’s worth noting that the Earthcore outdoor dance festival was on this weekend, and it had sold-out : not sure of exact numbers but “a few thousand” tickets was one figure.
You can add to that list the Queenscliffe Music Festival and Great Victorian Bike Ride which also ran on Election weekend 2010, and were running again this weekend.
Thanks very much bakunin. I suppose we might speculate that the Brunswick Green voters are quite different to the Melbourne or Richmond ones in terms of their tendency to attend such events. What there actually were in 2010 were not huge numbers of early votes but huge numbers of out-of-electorate absents, which fits with what you say, and they were hugely Green. There again seem to be hefty numbers of them this time but the big increase is in presumably within-electorate prepolls.
TTF+B: I think that not many AJP voters will follow the card in Prahran but that those who don’t will rather strongly (maybe not super-strongly) preference the Greens anyway.
28
The Brunswick absents will be interesting to watch.
Prepolls in many seats will be interesting.
I agree about following the card. It probably was handed out to only a proportion of the voters. The number preferencing the ALP ahead of the Greens will be crucial.
I am currently writing a big post on Prahran. Will be a few hours at this rate.
30
I look forward to it.
I walked past the pre-poll centre in Bruswick a couple of times and the Greens and Labor were both there handing out each time
Would be a great result if the Greens get home imo
Does anyone put any value on what Steve Bracks said last night about the prepoll centre in Morwell being in Morwell? With only 55.9% counted and the Nationals candiate in front by 818 it really is still in play I’d suggest. Antony has it as a “like Nat retain”
The mine fire looks like it played a large part in the swing against the sitting member especially in Morwell itself
Does anyone have any ideas or predictions about whether Prahran is going to fall (whether to Labor or the Greens)?
Prahran: sort of seat where Greens would do better vs Libs than Labor? more right-wing Green voters than Labor social conservatives =Vic equivalent of Wentworth?
The latest update on the VEC website (7:44pm) for Prahran has the greens 88 votes behind Labor, and the ALP 397 votes behind the Liberals on the 2PP. This is an increase of 250 votes in the liberal lead
35
They have been counting postal votes. Sitting MPs, particularly sitting Liberal MPs, usually do comparatively well on those and the Greens do comparatively badly.
The Greens could likely make the 88 up on Animal Justice Party preferences and apparently the Greens have a better preference flow than the ALP.
34
The Greens would be getting some otherwise Liberal voters, especially with a state government travelling badly and Abbott in at Commonwealth level, but most of the reason the Greens likely have a better preference flow than the ALP is that the vast majority of the ALP voters assumed the ALP would not be distributed and so did not care where their preferences went and so followed the ALP how to vote card.
I expect that the Greens will have a lower preference flow from the ALP next time, whether or not they make second place but especially if they do.
Isn’t it somewhat courageous to be predicting the outcome of close seats given the huge number of pre-poll and postals in this election given the huge number of variables in this election?
That is, as Ttfab has pointed out, pre-poll and postals votes traditionally tend to favour the conservative parties but traditionally IIRC we only had about 10% of such votes being cast. This time there seem to be at least three times as many and using voter behaviour from the olden days as a guide to what has gone on in this election seems a bit silly.
http://kevinbonham.blogspot.com.au/2014/11/victorian-election-postcount-prahran.html
Victorian election postcount: Prahran.
I’ve been looking at this one seat for about five hours now and I don’t know the answer. I think it is hard for Labor to get second and harder for them to win if they do. Currently I lean mildly towards Newton-Brown holding Hibbins but I really do not know and could be missing any number of relevant things. Any corrections welcome.
The thing is that although you’d expect ALP supporters to preference Greens more weakly than the other way around, that only applies to those who are making their own decisions. More ALP supporters follow the card than Greens supporters so you have nearly half the ALP vote in the Green column before the other half start thinking for themselves.
William Bowe@3
I could actually only find one – Balmain 2011. All the other Lib vs Greens were outright majorities with no prefs distributed. If anyone finds any others anywhere please let me know. It happens often in Tas and ACT under Hare-Clark but Tas has a very different dynamic to other states re the status of the Greens.
Scrutineering data just posted to my site by Luke Corcoran says Labor doing much better on prepolls than my projection, which if it holds implies Greens would be knocked out – and either way implies that Newton-Brown should win.
Reader Peter Noonan on my site noticed that the Greens’ lead in Melbourne has been cut to 323. Yesterday it was 545 and the number of 2PP votes hasn’t changed. Looks like 111 votes in wrong 2PP pile! Makes seat quite close now.
The scrutineering comments attributed to Luke Corcoran were fake by an imposter troll.
[I could actually only find one – Balmain 2011.]
I seem to remember Labor doing so badly last time in really safe Liberal seats (Vaucluse, North Shore and Lane Cove, for instance) that they finished third to the Greens.
43
I had just been thinking that the comments might not be real, then I refreshed and found your comment I am replying to.
Good news.
44
40 mentioned that there were seats where the Greens came second but the Liberals won on primaries so there were no distributions.
Tom the first and best@45
Yeah, I’m one of the most gullible people on the planet and easily sucked in by this sort of thing. Unfortunately for the troll my fondness for posting HTs on Twitter brought it undone much faster than might otherwise have been the case.
Troll’s been hanging around on my site and keeping an eye on its handiwork for hours now. Possibly based in Sydney, which is odd if true. I have its IP number and enough metadata to satiate even George Brandis.
Labor finished third behind the Greens and Coalition in 13 seats in NSW in 2011, including all those William mentions, but in 12 of those the Coalition won on the first ballot so no preferences were distributed (and the flows would have been misleading anyway.)
Greens also finished second to the Libs in Noosa at the 2012 Qld state election. ALP preferences went 80/20 to the Greens. The Libs got 60% of the primary, so good on the ECQ for distributed preferences so we can have this discussion.
And in two wards in Brisbane City Council elections – Walter Taylor and Pullenvale- the Greens also came second to the Libs. Again, the Libs got well over 50% but preferences were 83/17 and 85/15 respectively.
links
http://www.ecq.qld.gov.au/elections/state/State2012/results/booth65.html
http://www.ecq.qld.gov.au/elections/local/LG2012/BrisbaneCity/results/councillor/booth24.html
http://www.ecq.qld.gov.au/elections/local/LG2012/BrisbaneCity/results/councillor/booth18.html
@46-7, Antony Green has Coalition vs Green margins on those 13 seats, so some sort of count was done somewhere. The NSWEC does not have them, but then the NSWEC has a terrible website.