Saturday, July 30
The preference distribution process in Higgins has resulted in tiny changes, never more than one vote in either direction per polling booth, that have collectively added three votes for Labor and taken three from the Liberal National Party, increasing the Labor margin from 35 to 41. The last word from the AEC was that this would be finalised tomorrow.
In other late counting news, One Nation candidate Lynette Keehn has overtaken Labor to reach the final count in the regional Queensland seat of Maranoa. This is a feat no party candidate other than Hanson herself was able to achieve at the party’s high-water mark election of 1998. However, the Nationals-aligned Liberal National Party candidate, David Littleproud, has 49.2% of the primary vote and will easily win the seat, which is vacated by the retirement of Bruce Scott. Labor edged One Nation on the primary vote by 18.3% to 17.8%, but One Nation pulled ahead after distribution of preferences. The Greens achieved in a similar feat in Tony Abbott’s seat of Warringah, pulling ahead of Labor after trailing 14.8% to 12.2% on the primary vote, with Tony Abbott on 51.6% and independent James Mathison on 11.4%. A two-party count has now been completed in the seat, giving Abbott a winning margin over the Greens candidate of 11.6%.
In seats where non-traditional two-party outcomes were correctly anticipated by the AEC, we are now at the stage where Labor-versus-Coalition preference counts are being conducted, which will ultimately allow a national two-party preferred result to be determined. Such counts have been completed for Denison (a 15.3% margin for over Liberal) and Kennedy (a 6.9% margin for the Liberal National Party), and are in progress in the three Labor-versus-Greens seats in Victoria, Melbourne, Batman and Wills (barely started in the first case, nearly finished for the second and third).
Both factors have caused an illusory surge for Labor in the published national two-party preferred tally published by the AEC. Warringah and Maranoa are excluded from this tally for the time being, but we know the results favoured the Coalition by 52,923 to 33,743 in Warringah and 60,771 to 29,228 in Maranoa, and that these numbers will ultimately be added back into the count. Furthermore, the seats awaiting to be counted on a Coalition-versus-Labor basis are almost all conservative (Barker, Grey, Higgins, Indi, Mayo, Murray and New England), the sole exception being Grayndler. When all votes are added to the count, the Coalition should have a final two-party preferred total approaching 50.5%.
Thursday, July 28
Latest:
• The early stages of the preference distribution in Herbert, which is expected to be completed over the weekend, has resulted in Labor losing a vote at the Kelso booth and the LNP losing one at Riverside, leaving the Labor lead unchanged at 35 votes.
• I’m hearing that the button the Senate count in Western Australia will be pressed on Monday.
• Psephologists are having a field day with the publication of complete preferences for all Senate ballot papers from Tasmania, my own contribution being a paywalled Crikey article observing patterns of voter behaviour and their implications for yet-to-be-determined counts in other states. Money quote:
Particularly striking is the failure of voters to have followed how-to-vote cards, even in the case of the major parties who had the base of volunteers needed to disseminate them … fewer than one-in-ten Liberal voters chose to be guided by the party’s card — which, remarkably, recommended a sixth preference for Labor — while the share of Labor voters that did so barely even registered. It should not be presumed, however, that voters reluctant to toe the party line instead gave expression to finely calibrated rational choices. Ballot paper ordering had a substantial influence on preferences, leading to a kind of “soft” donkey voting, in which those who find their favoured party near the front end of the ballot paper tended to remain there when allocating subsequent preferences.
Part of my homework for the article included the development of this spreadsheet (note there are separate worksheets for the total result, above-the-line votes only and below-the-line votes only) which identify the frequency with which voters for each party (in rows) included each other party (in columns) in their top six. Kevin Bonham has put precise figures to the meagre rate of how-to-vote card adherence for the various parties, and David Barry has a nifty tool for exploring preference flows with greater precision than my own spreadsheet.
Wednesday, July 27: Tasmanian Senate result
The Tasmanian count ended with Richard Colbeck dropping out, and the final result being determined in favour of Nick McKim over One Nation by 141 votes. Result: 1.Abetz (Lib), 2.Urquhart (ALP), 3.Whish-Wilson (GRN), 4.Lambie (JLN), 5.Parry (Lib), 6.Polley (ALP) 7.Duniam (Lib), 8.Brown (ALP), 9.Bushby (Lib), 10.Singh (ALP), 11.Bilyk (ALP), 12.McKim (GRN).
The full distribution of preferences can be viewed here. Above-the-line votes alone were enough to elect the top three Labor (Anne Urquhart, Helen Polley, Carol Brown) and Liberal (Eric Abetz, Stephen Parry, Jonathan Duniam) candidates, and the lead candidates for the Greens (Peter Whish-Wilson) and the Jacqui Lambie Network (Jacqui Lambie) had a quota when their first preference below-the-line votes were added to the above-the-line total. That left four seats outstanding, which were not determined until the final stages of the count, which are summarised thus:
Richard Colbeck’s below-the-line support wasn’t quite enough to keep him ahead of One Nation’s Kate McCulloch after preferences. Colbeck began the count with 13474 votes to McCulloch’s 8641, but McCulloch was the direct beneficiary of above-the-line preferences to One Nation, whereas above-the-line preferences to the Liberals were soaked up by David Bushby, who held the place above Colbeck on the Liberal ticket. By the key point in the count, McCulloch’s vote had swollen to 18136, whereas Colbeck had to rely entirely on below-the-line preferences to reach 16918, 1218 astern of McCulloch. Colbeck’s exclusion then unlocked a flood of preferences that were easily enough to elect Bushby, but also to just push Lisa Singh over the line with a gain of 2171 – evidently she garnered substantial support even from right-of-centre below-the-line voters.
Then came the distribution of the fairly substantial Liberal surplus, from which Labor did remarkably well, gaining 4412 votes compared with 2242 for One Nation and 1269 for the Greens, with 2816 exhausting. Presumably the Liberals’ remarkable decision to recommend a sixth preference to Labor had a fair bit to do with this. However, this was not decisive, and purely influenced the size of Catryna Bilyk’s margin over Nick McKim and Kate McCulloch in taking the eleventh seat (notably, fourth-placed Bilyk was elected later in the count than sixth-placed Singh – fifth-placed John Short lost out altogether). That left the twelfth seat as a race between McKim and McCulloch that began with McKim leading by 43 votes, ahead of the distribution of Labor’s 593-vote surplus. Those votes went 234 to McKim and 136 to McCulloch with 221 exhausting, and McKim carried the day by a margin of 141.
Tuesday, July 26
The recount of the primary vote and the indicative two-party count has now been completed with the latter showing Labor 37 votes ahead, after adjustments to nine polling booths cut Labor back by 34 votes while reducing the LNP by one vote; the pre-poll count added four for the LNP and reduced Labor by three; and two was added to Labor’s total on postals. Now the count will proceed to a full distribution of preferences, beginning with the last placed Palmer United, who were pretty bold fielding a candidate given the local circumstances (he polled 316 votes, or 0.36% of the total). In theory, this should end by confirming the result of the indicative count, but the process of reviewing preference votes will surely turn up further minor anomalies. Should Labor’s win be confirmed, the Coalition is gearing up for a legal challenge based on suggestions up to 85 defence personnel stationed in the electorate were deprived of a vote because insufficient voting facilities were provided during an exercise being conducted South Australia, and 39 Townsville Hospital patients were denied a vote when they attempted to do so during the final hour of what should have been the polling period on election day. Michael Maley, a former Australian Electoral Commission official, has noted in comments that Section 367 of the Commonwealth Electoral Act would set a high bar on the defence personnel issue especially. The hospital issue could prove more problematic, depending on what the circumstances prove to have been.
Equally excitingly, it appears we are now finally to get to the business end of Senate counting, with Kevin Bonham hearing informally that the button will be pressed on the Tasmanian result tomorrow afternoon – although the AEC is being a little more circumspect publicly. The intricacies of the count have been explored in headache-inducing detail on Kevin’s blog – to cut a long story short, there look sure to be five Labor, four Liberal, one Greens and Jacqui Lambie, with the last seat up for grabs. He deems, without huge confidence, the order of likelihood for the final seat to be a second Green, a fifth Liberal, and One Nation. It appears almost certain that below-the-line votes will overturn the order of Labor’s ticket to deliver a seat to sixth-placed Lisa Singh at the expense of fifth-placed John Short. Richard Colbeck, the fifth-placed Liberal candidate, has also benefited from a backlash against his party’s ticket order, but not to the extent of overtaking fourth-placed David Bushby. However, it’s on the strength of his own votes that Colbeck will linger to the final stages of the count and leave the Liberals in the hunt for a fifth seat. The question is whether he finishes ahead of the One Nation candidate, in which case he could potentially end up ahead of the second Green, Nick McKim, if a generally right-of-centre pool of micro-parties preferences favour him with sufficient force – although it would be a tall order. If Colbeck drops out, it comes down to McKim versus One Nation, to be determined mostly by Liberal preferences, which would need to flow massively to One Nation for McKim to be defeated.
vernula publicus @ #51 Wednesday, July 27, 2016 at 4:03 pm
No, this too is false. The quota does not lower at any stage of a Senate count. As votes exhaust the number of votes which would make one secure from any mathematical chance of defeat will lower (slightly), but that does not mean a candidate is declared elected on reaching that target and indeed they continue to receive preferences even when their election is certain.
We actually *should* use a progressively reducing quota now that we have significant exhaust, but at this stage it is not in the system. I will probably raise it again in the next JSCEM cycle.
KB@9.31
Spot on!
As I posted earlier, an extremely just result.
[I go further. The old Senate system was a denial of the human right of equal protection under the law for differing political opinions. Anyone who defends it is an accessory to the denial of human rights]
WoW just WoW
@ kevin – thanks for that clarification. That does mean they aren’t equivalent.
If I’m understanding this right, this could lead to situations where a full senate is not electable? Taking as an extreme example to make the maths easy, everyone just votes one for their party/candidate using the first preference from Tas this election. That leads to 10 seats being handed to Labor, Liberals, Green and JLN. Then, people are excluded from the count, but no-one ever gets to a quota to claim the 11th and 12th spots. What actually would happen? Do they just give the two spots to the two candidates that were the last to be excluded?
Scott,
Yes. This is what happens in NSW and what happened to McKim also (who was elected on less than a quota).
Yes, Scott, that follows by simple logic and the drafters of the CEA thought of the possibility long ago when they included s 273(18):
(18) Notwithstanding any other provision of this section, where the number of continuing candidates is equal to the number of remaining unfilled vacancies, those candidates shall be elected.
wewantpaul @ #103 Wednesday, July 27, 2016 at 10:44 pm
Yeah, really amazing that people take equal rights seriously in a liberal democracy, isn’t it? Better stop it quick fast, it’s the thin end of the wedge to same-sex marriage and letting women keep the vote.
I am very serious about this. It is only a small-scale violation of human rights but it is one visited upon a very large number of people. I was seriously researching options for a human rights case against Australia in the event that this group ticket coercive voting madness continued. Unfortunately it turned out that Australia’s clear commitment to take the equal protection of its citizens seriously was not in fact binding.
In an amusing twist of fate, I calculate that people who voted 1 Colbeck 2 Singh probably saved McKim from losing to One Nation.
Kevin Bonham’s glorious refutation of the anti-Senate-reform garbage is a sight to behold, and is 100% correct. Bravo.
The human rights argument is outlined on pp.8-9 of my second JSCEM submission (click on link “Main submission” here:
http://kevinbonham.blogspot.com.au/2016/02/senate-reform-jscem-submission-take-two.html)
I’ll believe anyone who supported the old system is serious and knows the gravity of what they are doing when, and only when, they write to the Attorney-General and propose that Australia withdraws its commitment to Article 26 of the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights.
kevin bonham @ #110 Wednesday, July 27, 2016 at 11:47 pm
bravo KB.
KB: oh, thats a bit of embarrassing miss by myself, in that case, perhaps ALP got the donkey vote to get that many preferences for ASP.
bug1 @ #112 Thursday, July 28, 2016 at 12:08 am
Voters who support ASP are drawn from the Labor-positive field even if the Party is a Lib-proxy. It’s no surprise to see prefs going to Labor.
briefly @ #113 Thursday, July 28, 2016 at 12:11 am
I agree with this. People who projected Colbeck as the winner of the final spot were often relying on assumptions about “right-wing” voters preferring the Coalition to Labor but it is not at all that simple, especially not with One Nation. A big lesson about the Tassie count that I picked up very early in scrutineering is that people have got to get a lot less simplistic in their thinking about “right-wing” and “left-wing”.
Oh I’ve just done a sample of last place votes (#58 BTL all the way) – only checked 5% so far because of computer memory issues but one E. Abetz has nearly four times as many of them as any other candidate, and 35% of them in total. Only about 2% voted all the way through though.
The Lying Waffle on sydney redneck radio this morning
“.@TurnbullMalcolm tells 2GB “there may well be a (court) challenge” in Herbert due to allegations people weren’t able to vote.”
@ Kevin B
Thanks for clarification about ASP vs ASXP! Would be interesting to know how Sex party prefs did go though. My speculation on the reasons why they did pref Labor ahead of Greens (at least here, in Reps) was just based on some old history that I know of, there may be more complex reasons.
Eric Abetz is arguing that the campaign led by Richard Bovill and others to put Richard Colbeck first, was the reason the Liberals lost the fifth seat. Bovill responded by saying ‘If this is what the Liberal Party wants to believe, then they have got a very, very long time in the wilderness, Eric Abetz only has to stand in front of the mirror to see where the problem is.’
The 35% of voters who put Abetz last certainly confirms Bovill’s view.
“”“.@TurnbullMalcolm tells 2GB “there may well be a (court) challenge” in Herbert due to allegations people weren’t able to vote.”””
Malcolm there was a 6.25% swing against you in Herbert, pull the other one!.
Cathy’s just skyrocketted up to 36 now. (she was on 35)
Last update 9.50am today
Seems to have been a recount of the prepolls.
The Riverside booth was updated at 9:50 am. Are they going to go through them all again?
Any time a politician uses a phrase like “may well be” it’s a deliberate hedge. Sounds like he’s unsure about whether he’ll be able to find sufficient grounds to support a challenge, if not trying to deliberately transition away from Ian Macdonald’s more pr-challenge sentiment.
It’s the least Turnbull can say, otherwise it would look like he’s giving up the fight, but he’s not committing himself either.
One course for Turnbull is to do polling of the electorate and see if there’s been a shift since the election, although the results may not be worth much more than scrap paper prior to a campaign.
The next time Malware and his friends complain about people being prevented from voting they might be referred to the fact that just over 2% of voters have not voted across Australia compared to the last election in the House of Reps, where counting is basically completed. The Senate is similar. That’s about 320,000 voters in total. And the reasons will be pretty much entirely related to Malware’s decision in calling an election in mid-winter and during school holidays in most states, which is very disruptive to voters. That’s about 2,150 voters in each electorate on average.
Yes, the Liberal complaints about people being “prevented from voting” are totally hypocritical. They try to do anything that they can get away with, to stop ALP & Green voters from being able to vote.
One example is their complaints about the Gillard government’s 2012 law to automatically enrol voters. The Coalition members on the parliamentary committee issued a dissenting report that it would “severely damage the integrity of the electoral roll”.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/automatic-enrolment-puts-coalition-seats-at-risk/story-fn59niix-1226533260326
Another example is a sneaky Howard government law change to restrict the reinstatement of voters to the electoral roll, which resulted in a large increase in the number of rejected Provisional ballots (which usually favour the ALP/Greens).
See figure 6.2 at:
http://www.aph.gov.au/parliamentary_Business/Committees/House_of_Representatives_Committees?url=em/elect10/report/chapter6.htm
Triton – because they will do the preference allocation by booth, it looks like they will update any variations as they go on the Polling Places tab. With the absents, postals etc they will do the same but I’m not sure if there is any way of monitoring this apart from seeing the totals changed?
Given they have already effectively done the 2PP split of all piles of votes to now be allocated as preferences the changes involved should be miniscule – one or 2 max per booth you would think.
johncanb @ #117 Thursday, July 28, 2016 at 9:11 am
It is not 35% of all voters. It is (or was) 35% of the 2% or so who went all the way BTL. It turns out over the full sample it is over 40% with Reynolds next on 5.5%, so Abetz received more than seven times as many #58s as anyone else. (massive HT to poster Alaric on my site for those stats.)
Valerie Kay: Sex Party prefs (this includes votes they received from other parties) went to Shooters Fishers and Farmers 19% Green 18.9 Labor 15.9 ON 13.9 Lib 9.4 FF 8.5 NXT 6.3 with 8.3% exhaust. If someone followed the Sex/HEMP how to vote card then their preference exhausted at this point.
There were only two preference flows between parties that exceeded 30%: Christian Democrats to Family First 44.7% and Rec Fishers to Shooters Fishers and Farmers 35.3%.
Interesting that the total Senate count has now clicked ahead of the HOR count 91.0 to 90.98. HOR will not shift more than .01 but the Senate could well get quite a bit higher. Last time the Senate was about 0.6% higher reflecting in part the ease of just voting 1 but also a group of people who only wanted to vote in Senate because they didn’t have someone they wanted to vote for in HOR or were just lazy.
The fact that the Senate vote will be higher even with the change to voting 1-6 at least for most people indicates very good acceptance of the new system.
Also interesting that the Senate informal rate is gradually trending down presumably as some “saved” 1 only votes are taken out of informals. Now only a 0.93% increase in Senate informals. Also matching the 0.86 reduction in HOR informals.
KB 12.13. Comment about SEX votes exhausting. Classic. Apart from the small % of extra votes that SEX would have collected from other excluded minors these are basically SEX votes. 100% of them would have exhausted if the voters had followed SEX HTV of Arts 2, Rec Fishers 3, Science 4, Animal Justice 5, Renewable Energy 6. All these groups eliminated at this point.
So about 92% of SEX voters were smarter than the SEX party leadership and sent their vote on to a party with a chance of being elected rather than exhausting. And we will still have people saying the best system is to allow party leaders to make those decisions and the voters are happy with that.
If preferences spreading out so much is confirmed in other states, then the major changing coming from this new voting system is that preferences are much less important as they cancel each other out, rather than snowball (which i guess was the whole point to the changes)
It will be interesting if it turns out that the donkey vote becomes much more significant, previously senate donkey voters where hidden by the parties preference system, now they arent.
That depends on interpretation. Can it be said that someone who voted Sex 1, Arts 2, Rec Fishers 3, Science 4, Animal Justice 5, Renewable Energy 6, and then proceeded to make their own choices for 7-<whatever> has not followed the HTV card? I don’t think it can.
I wish the AEC would post some updates on the Herbert preference throw. :-/
The sex party preferences weren’t stupid exactly, they were partially about punishing the Greens for the Senate reform. The rest is the problematic effect of actually doing 6 in order of preference when that doesn’t backstop with a major (especially for a larger minor like the Sex Party which gets eliminated late). This is why people really should preference until they no longer care about which of the remainder wins or at least to their preferred major or even better their non-preferred major (I did because I knew I’d rather have an LNP than One Nation or Family First).
A R. We may be able to find out from someone with access to the data how many SEX voters followed their HTV. I assume they didn’t have many people on booths and also a good assumption that not many people found the HTV on a website. My guess would be about 1% of SEX voters followed the HTV.
Almost every party including SEX told people just to vote 1 to 6. A few gave a hint that you could vote for more but basically apart from 1 or 2 very small parties I don’t think any were saying it was a good idea to vote beyond 6. So any SEX voters who went beyond 6 were contrary to party advice.
The fact is that the SEX voters made up their own minds and it was chalk and cheese compared to what the party was advising. Almost all would have stopped at 6 but they managed to direct these preferences to bigger parties rather than the minor groups suggested by SEX.
@ Kevin B thank you
@ Wakefield
I hadn’t actually looked at the HTVs so I had a look at the Victorian ones here http://voteasxp.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/ASXP-051653-HTV-Victoria-Cards_Landscape-19.pdf
They preferenced the same way in the Victorian Senate but in the HoR seats of interest to the Greens (including Wills where I was) they preferenced Labor ahead of the Greens. Looks like a deal of some kind, interesting that I for one hadn’t heard of it (given that I am a political tragic). Apart from policy conflicts such as I mentioned, it looks very much like they hoped to get something from it, which I presume must have been preferencing from Labor in the Senate.
It would be interesting to know how much of a difference it made in those ALP-Greens contest Victorian HoR seats, though even if people had followed the Sex HTV, I don’t think that alone would have been enough to make the difference in Feeney getting elected or not in Batman, which was the closest seat.
@ Timothy Rawlins – I hadn’t seen your comment when I posted mine, but do you think punishing the Greens for Senate reform is the only reason Sex put Labor ahead of Greens in the Victorian Greens-targeted HOR seats? I would think that was important enough to Labor that Labor must have promised them something in return.
@Valerie Kay
I don’t know for HoR. I’m sure they would have hedged if Labor was potentially offering Senate Preferences even if they’d been planning it to punish the Greens. So it’s probably impossible to say with any real certainty unless you’ve got an insider.
Though a quick comparison of NSW Senate HTV cards to other ones suggest there was some strategic dealing going on in Vic (the Sex Party appear either below the Greens or not at all on other states)
Kelso booth updated. ALP lost 1 vote. Margin now 35 again.
Cathy has lost another ‘Herbert’ vote – she is down to 35 infront again.
Posted at 3.45pm Thurs on the AEC website.
I have no idea of what has been checked so far.
Perhaps someone wiser than I can ‘please explain’
Tetsujin, do you have any idea of how many booths have been done and how many to go?
I’m hearing that the button the WA Senate count gets pressed on Monday.
Commentators wondering about the Sex Party preferencing Labor in Victoria would do well to pay attention to state politics. In short, Labor has managed to maintain good relations with the five non-Greens cross-benchers.
I can only presume Jeffemu that they are doing the full distribution of preferences booth by booth, and updating as they complete each booth. Kelso and Riverside are the booths which have been updated so far.
No idea Jeffemu. I’m just looking at the website too. 🙂
Going by the website, only 2 booths have been done.
a r @ #131 Thursday, July 28, 2016 at 3:09 pm
I think this depends on the exact wording of the card. If it says “number at least” then it is open to interpretation, but most cards just gave six numbers. There doesn’t actually seem to be a complete scan of the Sex Party HTV still online.
I have never seen booth by booth full distribution of preferences published.
Ahh yes. I’d forgotten about that.
Antony Green website has a lot of Senate HTV cards up still. http://www.abc.net.au/news/federal-election-2016/guide/swa/htv/#S
I agree Tom the first and best. I have never seen booth by booth full distribution of preferences published. But undertaking the full distribution of preferences booth by booth would make sense logistically, particularly given you want to make sure that each booth’s votes are kept separate in case of a Court of Disputed Returns challenge.
I believe I heard where Herbert was meant to be declared tomorrow (Friday) …. after the recount. Can anyone verify that for me.