Live publication of results, updated by the minute with full booth results and swings, can be found here. Commentary of the progress of the count follows below.
Thursday evening
The remarkable swing to Phelps on postals continues, with today’s batch favouring her 306-243. This means the progress of her two-party vote across the five batches has gone 36%, 40%, 45%, 52%, 55%. She also gained with the addition of pre-poll declaration votes, which favoured her 189-112. Her lead is now 38,757 to 36,974, or 1783 votes, which is probably more than the number of late arriving postals that constitute all that’s left to come. Phelps’ margin has ticked over from 1.1% to 1.2%, and looks sure to stay above 1%.
Wednesday evening
The dwindling daily addition of postals put a further nail in the coffin today, breaking 242-224 in favour of Kerryn Phelps. Her shares of the two-party vote across the four batches of postals that have been added to the count have been, consecutively, 36%, 40%, 45% and 52%. The provisional votes were also added to the count, and they were higher than usual in number and heavily favourable to Phelps, who received 246 to Sharma’s 175. Phelps’ leads is out from 1554 to 1643, with roughly 2000 postals and 250 declaration pre-poll votes to come.
Tuesday evening
The count continues to drift away from Dave Sharma, with today’s postals favouring him only 433-361, giving him 54.5% where he needs nearly three-quarters. Phelps’s current lead is 1554 votes, with maybe 3500 still to come.
Monday evening
Today’s counting consisted of finishing off the rechecking of ordinary votes. It appears 54 votes in the Paddington PPVC were reassigned from Sharma to Phelps; other than that, the effect was to cut 209 votes from Sharma’s total and 234 from Phelps’s. So evidently a lot of the action on rechecking has consisted of ruling informal votes that were initially admitted to the count. The upshot is that little has changed since yesterday, except that the window seems to have closed on a major anomaly being identified in rechecking, which was Sharma’s best hope. I had a fairly extensive look at the progress of the count in a paywalled article in Crikey today.
Sunday evening
Today’s events as they unfolded:
• Anxieties in the pro-Phelps/anti-Liberal camp that set in as the largest pre-poll voting centres recorded their votes late last night cranked up a notch in the morning as the first and biggest batch of postals were added to the count. These broke 3356-1858 in favour of Sharma (later revised to 3346-1851), his 64.4% share being fractionally more than he would likely need to rein in what remained of Phelps’s lead. Not long after, Antony Green wrote on Twitter: “No (Phelps) is not home. The difference between on the day voting and voting in advance is wider than I’ve ever seen at an election. In conversation with very senior party people today, they have the same opinion.”
• Around 10:30am or so, Sharma got a further small boost when the two Special Hospital Team booths were added to the total, collectively breaking his way by 266-54.
• After that though, the pendulum swung back. The AEC set to work on the routine recheck of the ordinary votes, starting with those booths where the preferences flows recorded yesterday appeared to be anomalous, as was keenly observed by Kevin Bonham. This confirmed that Phelps had indeed been short-changed in the Bondi Beach and Bellevue Hill booths – because, according to Antony Green, the preferences from primary votes for the Liberal candidate had been entered the wrong way around. As a result, Phelps’ 2132-1714 lead in Bondi Beach blew out to 2427-1330, and Sharma’s purported 1305-985 lead in Bellevue Hill turned out to be only 1152-1119. About half the booths have had their votes rechecked to this point, the net effect of the others being neutral.
• Then a second batch of postals went 698-467 to Sharma, or 59.9% to 40.1% – less than he would have needed even before the rechecking raised the bar.
The main votes yet to be counted are late-arriving postals – I see no reason to doubt my earlier judgement that the final number of postals will be very close to the 9392 that were cast in 2016, since the number of applications received was almost identical. That leaves maybe 3000 postals outstanding, along with provisionals and pre-poll declaration votes, of which a high-end estimate would be about 500. This leaves Sharma with about 3500 votes outstanding with which to close a gap of 1616, meaning he will need about 73%.
That’s not going to happen, so it will take the emergence of another error in what remains of the rechecking to make a Sharma victory plausible. Precedents do exist, such as the decisive 1000 votes that showed up for Cathy McGowan as she grappled with Sophie Mirabella in Indi in 2013. But if the remainder of the count proceeds normally, Sharma only seems likely to reel his existing deficit in by around 700 votes, giving Phelps a winning margin of around 900 votes, or 0.6%.
Sunday morning
To cut the following long story short: this isn’t over.
Those who were still paying attention at the close of last night’s action were thrown into a spin when Dave Sharma did remarkably well out of the pre-poll voting centres, which these days account for many thousands of votes and do not report their results into well into the evening. In particular, the 6431 votes of the Rose Bay PPVC broke 4473-1958, which slashed Phelps’ lead from 4.2% to 1.9% – creating just the slightest opportunity for Sharma to pull a rabbit out of the hat on postals.
In the last of my updates in the section below, I calculated that Sharma would need 70% of postals to close the gap, but it seems this was an overestimate. The number of postal votes issued at this by-election has been almost identical to that in 2016 (12860 compared with 12796), so it’s a very safe bet the number of formal postal votes will be around the same, namely 9329. We can also expect 500 or so provisional and pre-poll declaration votes, but it’s the postal votes that are most interesting because they skew conservative. Malcolm Turnbull did around 9.5% better with postals in 2016 as compared with ordinary votes, on both the primary and two-party preferred vote.
If that bears out this time, Sharma can expect to reduce his present deficit of 2590 votes by around 1400. However, it’s not impossible that he will do significantly better than that. Given the trend of polling and the general course of political events over the past week or two, it could be surmised he would do relatively well on votes that were cast earlier in the process. Kevin Bonham points out that the Mayo by-election is particularly auspicious for the Liberals in that Rebekha Sharkie gained a 3.5% two-party swing on ordinary votes against the Liberals, but there was actually a 5.1% swing in the Liberals’ favour on postals. No doubt this was unusual, but it does demonstrate that it would not be without precedent for postals to weigh towards Sharma heavily enough to sneak him over the line.
However, some objections have been noted to the results as currently published:
• The Rose Bay PPVC is an extreme outlier in having a primary vote swing of only 1.9% against the Liberals, where in every other booth it was in double digits (not counting the 16 votes cast through the blind or low vision telephone voting service), and this is not reflected in any unusual movement in the Labor primary vote. However, this very likely reflects the fact that the Rose Bay PPVC wasn’t in use at the 2016 election, and the “historic” vote totals provided by the AEC to facilitate booth-matched swing calculations (including those featured in my own results facility) were well off the mark. Specifically, the “historic” totals only account for 1459 formal votes, of which 983 were credited to the Liberals, compared with the 6431 that actually appear to have been cast. As such, I see no reason not to think Sharma was indeed being undersold in early assessments of the count, as it was not appreciated how much of the harbourside vote was locked up in the Rose Bay PPVC, waiting to be unleashed at the very end of the night.
• Probably more substantively, Kevin Bonham has identified curiously weak preference flows for Phelps at Bondi Beach and Bellevue Hill. These would be consistent with 450 votes that properly belong to Phelps having been wrongly placed in Sharma’s pile. If the imminent rechecking of votes indeed proves this to be so, the hill would look just that little bit too high for Sharma to claim. But as Bonham also notes, there could just as easily be other inconsistencies awaiting discovery that could tip the balance the other way.
Election night
Midnight. The last pre-poll voting centres tightened things up quite a lot – not quite enough for Sharma, but there won’t be much in it in the end. Phelps ends the night with a 1.9% lead, which would leave Sharma needing a more-than-plausible 70% or so of postals.
9.55pm. The Paddington pre-poll booth has reported on the primary vote, and it’s a better result for Sharma than the Paddington election day booths, suggesting Phelps’ current 4.4% lead on 2CP will be wound back a little by the end of the night.
9.37pm. If anyone’s still paying attention, all the election day polling booths have reported their 2CP counts now. But we’re still yet to see either primary or 2CP numbers from the four pre-poll voting centres, which should be with us later this evening.
9.02pm. None of the four pre-poll voting centres have reported yet. Other than that, there are three booths yet to report their two-candidate preferred results.
8.36pm. With 28 booths in out of 43, Phelps’ lead is 55-45, which is exactly what the Liberal internal polling in The Australian this week purported to show. Sharma’s primary vote of 39.9% is also what today’s report of Liberal internal polling in the Daily Telegraph said it would be.
8.12pm. Phelps’ lead after preferences looks to have moderated a bit, with 16 booths out of 43 counted, but just eyeballing the booths that are in on the primary but not the two-candidate count, they are largely from relatively weak areas for the Liberals like Bondi, Clovelly and Paddington. In any case, Phelps’ 54.4% obviously leaves her home and hosed. She is giving her victory speech as I type.
7.43pm. Two-candidate preferred results are coming in at a clip, with eight of them now in, and Phelps now leads 56.2-43.8. Labor’s Tim Murray has edged ahead of the Greens on the primary vote, for what it’s worth. That he wasn’t doing so earlier was another symptom of the first booths being extremely wealthy harbourside ones.
7.35pm. Now we’ve got two-party results from Bondi North and Darlinghurst East, and I need no longer fret that my results display has the Liberals in front.
7.30pm. No doubt having sixteen candidates slows up the two-candidate count.
7.28pm. Twelve booths in on the primary vote – not much point in obsessing over them individually now. Still waiting for some more two-candidate results so my display stops showing the Liberals in front.
7.22pm. Bronte and Edgelcliff added on the primary vote. Still waiting on a fourth two-party result to push Phelps ahead on two-candidate preferred, which is where she will clearly end up.
7.18pm. Antony Green calls it.
7.17pm. Bondi Beach East two-party result almost pushes Phelps ahead on the raw two-party count, which is still dominated by two strong Liberal harbourside booths.
7.16pm. Wealthy Bellevue Hill South pushes Sharma ahead on the primary vote; inner city Darlinghurst East fails to reverse it. But the Liberal primary vote is clearly still too low.
7.14pm. Bondi North in, and the pattern is highly consistent: primary vote swings against the Liberals are between 19.9% to 27.1%. That leaves them below 40% of the primary vote, which is fatal for them particularly given the strength of Phelps’ primary vote.
7.10pm. Vaucluse is in on two-party, and because the two booths to have reported on two-party are super-rich Vaucluse and Double Bay East, the raw two-party vote is deceptively favourable for Sharma. So far though, Phelps is getting 65% of preferences, and she’s actually ahead on the primary vote with five booths counted (the latest being Kings Cross Central, a leftish booth where the Liberals are down 20.2% to 25.5%).
7.09pm. Worth noting Phelps’ thumping primary vote, three to four times higher than Labor or the Greens.
7.06pm. Bondi Beach East is the Liberals’ least bad result so far in terms of the primary vote swing, but it’s also the booth where they had the least to lose. The bigger deal is that Phelps has trounced them on the primary vote, 41.4% to 29.7%.
7.00pm. First preference count in from Double Bay East: Phelps gets over 80% of them, 65 to 15, and only loses the booth 52-48. Liberals down 25.7% on primary vote in Darlinghurst East. Early days, but not looking good for them.
6.53pm. If the swing holds, Sharma ends up on 38.8% of the primary vote, which is less than he wants. But booths in are super-wealthy and not broadly representative.
6.51pm. Vaucluse a bit better for the Libs than Double Bay East – down 22.9% rather than 27.1%, Phelps on 20.0% rather than 29.5%.
6.46pm. Details of Australia Institute exit poll here.
6.42pm. So far so good for my live reporting — my swings are the same as the ABC’s.
6.40pm. We have a result: harbourside booth of Double Bay East. Liberal vote down 27.1% to 47.7%; Phelps on 29.5%. Fairly small booth with 346 votes, but an encouraging result for Phelps I’d have thought.
6.15pm. Which is a bit disappointing from my perspective, as it means I can’t give my results projections a workout, assuming as they did a Liberal-versus-Labor count in which two-party swings could be calculated. From the perspective of letting us know who’s likely to win though, it’s very likely the correct choice.
6pm. Polls have closed, and the first mystery of the night is resolved: the AEC’s notional two party count will be between Dave Sharma and Kerryn Phelps. My live results facility will be up shortly.
Darn:
William
If you’re still there. Two questions:
1. What is Phelps margin now?
2. Has the recounting of votes now finished?
______________________
Put this into your bookmarks:
https://www.pollbludger.net/results/fed-2018-10-wentworth-results.htm
From this url, here are the headlines:
Kerryn Phelps (Independent) 37,576 51.1%
Dave Sharma (Liberal) 36,017 48.9%
And my understanding is that there are still postal votes to be counted as they come in.
So the final count is not yet available.
William
Disregard my first question. I was able to establish that myself. But I’m still interested in where we are in regard to the re-count.
@Don,
Just going on the number of booths that have been updated since Saturday night it looks like they’re about 3/4 of the way through updating/checking the Saturday night booth figures.
Thanks Don
Yes, I’m aware of the pending postals. I was just a bit anxious about the possibility of Phelps losing more to Sharma in the general recount.
With 1559 in the bank she should just about have him covered on the postals. IIRC William is of the view that there shouldn’t be more than about 3000 to come and Sharma would need to get about 75% of them to win – and he won’t.
It does look like the margin is too big to recover through postals. So as long as the general recount does uncover a significant batch of votes in the wrong pile – things are on track for Phelps
And on that topic, the Bellevue Hill update added 15 to Phelps lead – one more booth ticked off.
opps last update was for Waverley PPVC
And the Randwick North booth update reduces Phelps lead by 34 to 1540….. these updates are like a box of chocolates
mick Quinlivan @ #1103 Sunday, October 21st, 2018 – 6:59 pm
Check out Rose Bay on the map – on the Harbour and sandwiched between Double Bay and Vaucluse and including Point Piper. It’s Harbourside Mansions all the way down. Given that people using PPVCs are predominantly old and infirm (go and do HTV duty at one if you don’t believe me) and what you are dealing with at Rose Bay is very rich old people. Of course it will be horrendously skewed toward Liberal. No need to invoke Jewishness or anything else.
Looking like a ~500 vote winning margin for Phelps.
No too bad really given the mountain she had to climb, and if she performs even modestly during whatever time she has between now and the full election I would not be surprised if the voters gave her another full term.
I recall the Libs were unable to get Sophie Mirrabella’s seat back from an independent.
Ouch back out to 1650 lead.
The Paddington PPVC booth update adds 108 votes to Phelp’s lead. Overall lead of 1650, up by 34 today.
Of course it will be horrendously skewed toward Liberal. No need to invoke Jewishness or anything else.
Rose Bay the suburb was over 27% Jewish, more than the Catholics and Anglicans combined.
http://quickstats.censusdata.abs.gov.au/census_services/getproduct/census/2016/quickstat/SSC13398?opendocument
Of course Jewishness is a legitimate factor in explaining the results in the Rose Bay pre poll.
And it’s also relevant that Kerryn Phelps’ wife – Jackie Stricker-Phelps – grew up in a liberal European Jewish household and Kerryn Phelps converted to Judaism. So Kerryn would have had some appeal with the liberal Jews but less appeal with the Orthodox, and the Rose Bay area has many Orthodox Jews. Religion is a complicated matter.
Ratsak
Of course Jewishness is a legitimate factor in explaining the results in the Rose Bay pre poll.
____________________________________
The fact is that we simply don’t know without conducting a survey. Taking the 27% figure as accurate, the fact is that these 27% are not just Jewish, but among the most wealthy Jewish people in Australia. Just like the other 73% of Rose Bay residents are among the most wealthy residents in Australia.
Now I’m not going to bother checking census data for that claim unless you find that hard to believe. But I think – and I’m happy to be corrected with actual evidence – that there is a far higher correlation of wealthy people voting Liberal than there is Jewish people voting Liberal. I’m basing this on the assumption that seats like Warringah and Bradfield, for example, have similar ratios of wealthy people thought not similar ratios of Jewish people.
Looks like there is only a couple of booths to be updated from their Saturday count. All up Phelps lead has increased by 14 to 1630 today. So it’s all down the postal votes – so far zero have been counted today.
TPOF,
The debate is around why the Rose Bay PPV was sooo heavily pro Sharma. People were assuming that like Bondi Beach and Bellevue Hill this booth must have had something wrong in the count. I know a bit about that part of town though, so it was easy to work out what was going on and quickly realise there was no counting error.
Rose Bay PPVC was over 10 points to the good for the Libs than the Rose Bay and Rose Bay Central Booths, and the Double Bay and Darling Point Booths, almost 20 points up on Watson Bay and Double Bay East. Those are the booths along the Harbour that take in the mega rich (apart from one we’ll get to in a second).
The only booths apart from the hospital teams that came close to Rose Bay PPVC were Vaucluse (the next harbourside suburbs East of Rose Bay) and Dover Heights (between Rose Bay/ Vaucluse and the Pacific Ocean). Now certainly the wealth of those two suburbs (that adjoin Rose Bay and so were likely to have used Rose Bay PPVC for pre polling also) is also a common factor. But you know what the other real common factor with Rose Bay is? To the surprise of absolutely no one who knows anything about that part of town it’s a high Jewish population. Over 23% in Vaucluse, and a whopping 48.5% in Dover Heights. Wentworth is the most Jewish seat in Australia. Rose Bay, Vaucluse and Dover Heights is by a massive amount the most Jewish part of Wentworth. 37% of Wentworth’s Jewish population at the last census lived in these three small suburbs that make up only a bit under 16% of the total population of Wentworth. And they tend to be more orthodox.
But tiny mega rich Vaucluse still fell short of Rose Bay PPVC, Dover Heights was almost 5% lower and the larger Vaucluse East could only rustle up 61.3% compared to Rose Bay PPVCs 69.7%
So the question of why Rose Bay PPVC was sooooooo pro-Lib isn’t explained by wealth alone. It is explained by the fact the suburbs around there have the highest proportion of orthodox Jews of any suburbs in the nation (that also happen to be very wealthy). Of course these orthodox Jews who are overwhelmingly conservative (if for no other reason than their perceived economic interest) will avail themselves of the opportunity to vote early at their local pre polling station as they are prevented from doing so on the Saturday by their religious beliefs. That’s why Rose Bay PPVC was stonkingly better for Sharma than even the normal Rose Bay booths. (it’s also why ScoMo’s Jerusalem gambit was sooo stupid – most of these people had already voted for his candidate)
ratsak
I’m willing to believe that Rose Bay PPVC attracted a higher than average share of Jewish voters. But even if you put in a dummy number (say 50% of all votes in the Rose Bay PPVC were Jewish – which is straining credibility) you still have a problem. The Sharma vote wasn’t just high, it was way over 7o% primary. You have to attribute to Jewish voters a 90% vote for Sharma or the maths won’t come close to balancing.
And you can’t come back and say oh well this booth also got the ultra rich who would also give Sharma a very high primary because if this were so it would show up on nearby booths on the Saturday.
ratsak
It is explained by the fact the suburbs around there have the highest proportion of orthodox Jews of any suburbs in the nation (that also happen to be very wealthy).
___________________________________
I know the area too. The most Orthodox Jews (though not the most wealthy) actually live around Bondi towards Bondi Junction. That said, I’m not questioning your statistics – I’m questioning the assumptions you drew from them. I agree that the Jerusalem announcement would have not won a single vote that had not already been committed to the Coalition. However, I draw attention again to the fact that rich people tend to vote Liberal – and that those who pre-poll, being older conservatives, better educated or more likely to be able to afford being outside the electorate on Election Day are more likely to vote Liberal. And yes, that would include wealthy religious Jews who were not going to vote on the Sabbath.
There is no doubt that there are Jewish people who will let their vote be determined by which Party they think is ‘better’ for Israel. But there are also increasing numbers of Jewish people who are Zionists but are appalled by what Netanyahu is doing and the regime he is running and who would be decidedly unimpressed by the Jerusalem gambit or any other action that encourages the current Israeli government to pursue the path it has been travelling.
There is a real risk that people of Jewish background can be typecast as having single-minded concerns – particularly that their first loyalty is to another country, rather than Australia. It is the same problem that Catholics face – where there is an assumption that any strongly believing Catholic would be more loyal to the Pope than to this country. GG on this blog is often excoriated for his position supporting Catholic orthodoxy. And in the last twenty-four hours Senator Kitching on this site has suffered from a similar prejudice, with sneering suggestions that she is DLP in disguise because she still argues her beliefs (none of which I agree with by the way).
What I am arguing against is the very thing that so many here purport to be opposed to: mindless typecasting and characterising people who belong to a social, ethnic, religious or other group (such as LGBTIQ). But the ease with which people here can fall into unsupported and, worse, unstated but implied assumptions does worry me.
That was my understanding also. That there was a very large concentration of Jewish people around Bondi Beach.
It was another reason for me wondering why the Rose Bay PPVC would be the booth of choice for Jewish pre-poll voters.
TPOF as I said above, I can’t make the math work. The ratio of votes at Rose Bay PPVC are just too high.
That’s just so wrong Pseudo.
For a start Sharma’s primary wasn’t over 70%. His 2CP is 69.66%. His Primary was 65.5%. This shit isn’t hard to look up, so why start from obviously false premises?
Secondly of course the booths got the ultra rich. It’s right in the middle of the richest strip of Real Estate in the country.
And yes, the orthodox Jewish population is more conservative than even their mega rich neighbours. Not all Jewish people are Lib voters (obviously), and indeed not all orthodox Jews, but the orthodox Jews around Rose Bay and Dover Heights are about as rusted on Lib as you can get. Is it really so hard to believe that they are even more rusted on than their other rich neighbours? Of course there is no simple to hand stat to prove it, but it’s a bit strange to see people denying the obvious. These people are just extremely conservative.
It’s not like there’s even an implied criticism in the observation, which seems to be why perhaps some are reluctant to go there. It is merely a statement of reality. Orthodox Jewish people are as entitled to their political positions as anyone else. And in our voting system we assist them to give life to that political position by providing pre polling essentially on demand so that the issues of voting on their sabbath are easily overcome.
The problem with trying to deny that there is a pretty straightforward religious explanation for why a disproportionately conservative voting block voted early in one particular pre poll centre located right in the middle of the highest concentration of that particular religious population in the country and no other pre poll centre, nor the election day booths in the locality is that none of the alternative explanations explain it in the slightest.
What I am arguing against is the very thing that so many here purport to be opposed to: mindless typecasting and characterising people who belong to a social, ethnic, religious or other group (such as LGBTIQ). But the ease with which people here can fall into unsupported and, worse, unstated but implied assumptions does worry me.
Then sorry but you are just peddling nonsense. On what possible basis is there to assume anything untoward on a simple observation that there is a simple explanation for the Rose Bay PPVC numbers? There is none. It is no more mindless typecasting than to note that the Muslim population around Lakemba helps give Tony Burke an extremely safe seat. It is you that is engaging in the mindless typecasting and unstated implied assumptions.
It’s of a kind with the nonsense idea that any criticism of Israel is anti semitic. If the mere mention of the word Jewish has you rushing to find anti semitism, then you need to have a look at yourself. I am quiet surprised you of all people would fall into such nonsense.
PS, seeing as the bit of Bondi up towards the Junction is basically the bottom of Rose Bay/Dover Heights (North Bondi really – 21.9% Jewish) and or the South end of Bellevue Hill (21.4% Jewish), you seem to be making a distinction with very little difference. You’re starting to get to equidistant between the Rose Bay and Waverley PPVCs. But the further south you go the Jewish population starts dropping off quite a lot. Bondi Junction is 10.8% but Bondi Beach is only 6.5%. As you head further south it continues to drop off. Queens Park is still pretty high at 9.3%, but Bronte, Waverley, Tamarama, and Clovelly are all under 5.2% and so less than half the electorate average. And these are the areas that would use the Waverley PPVC. So yes, quite a few especially around Queens Park, Junction, North Bondi, south end of Bellevue Hill, but less as a total percentage of all the pre poll voters being Jewish.
Interestingly enough though the Waverley PPVC was also noticeably more pro-Sharma than the surrounding election day booths. At 49.5% 2CP he did 11.5% better than the Waverley booth, 7% better than the Waverley North booth, 8% better than Randwick North, 7.5% better than Clovelly North, 4% better than Bondi Junction North, 5% better than Bondi Junction, 12% better than Bondi, 14% better than the 2 Bondi Beach booths, 8% better than Bondi North, 9% better than Bondi South, 13% better than Bondi Surf, 15% better than Bronte and Clovelly, and a whopping 19% better than Clovelly Beach. Was it the too rich to vote on Saturday crowd here also bumping up the Liberal vote? Hmmm, if only there was a group of people more conservative than their neighbours who had a particularly strong preference for early voting that might explain some of this discrepancy.
PPS, lest you wish to try failing logic 101 again, no of course I am not saying orthodox Jewish voters explains the discrepancy in it’s entirety. There will of course be other factors. For instance the fact that the Liberals imploded in the last week is very likely also to have helped widen the gap between prepolling and election day voting. But there is something going on in Wentworth that doesn’t have a precedent I’m aware of, but does seem to have an extremely handy demographic explanation. I’m sure those who stake their reputation on making election night calls will be thinking carefully about how to account for this in future so that they don’t find themselves making calls at 7:18 that end up looking very courageous once the pre polling centres report.
ratsak. My head is spinning. Numbers, numbers, numbers. I really don’t get the point other than all of the pre-poll centres reflect a substantially higher vote for the Liberals than the on-the-day voting. As for the rest:
“It is no more mindless typecasting than to note that the Muslim population around Lakemba helps give Tony Burke an extremely safe seat.”
Tony Burke has an extremely safe seat because the people in his electorate are a lot poorer than the average Australian electorate. The fact that an above average number are Muslim is neither here nor there. There is a strong argument that it was relevant in the Marriage equality survey, but there is a rational connection there. I certainly wouldn’t draw the conclusion that Muslims would vote Labor because it is perceived as more anti-Israel or pro-Arab than the Coalition.
I did not use the descriptor ‘anti-semitic’ and did not intend to imply that. Anti-semitism is a real problem in some circumstances relating to criticism of Israel, but the issue I was raising here was the more general one of typecasting a whole group based on combining views of specific issues with general typecasting. Which is why I drew the comparison with some of the assumptions and extrapolations about practising Catholics generally expressed even here because of the clear adherence of some to arguing positions championed by their religious leaders.
ratsak what I am saying here is the ultra rich non Jewish crowd who can vote on a Saturday didn’t seem to show up at nearby polling booths. Are you trying to tell me that the ultra rich also have a very high propensity to pre-poll as well?
I agree with ratsak above – all the above said though, the on-the-night early calls of the result only started looking unduly courageous because the tightening was exaggerated by wrong numbers that were crediting Sharma with something like 0.7% 2CP more than he actually had (as at the end of Saturday night. )
Had the numbers on the AEC site in the three booths with wrong preferences been the correct ones the narrative would much more likely have been “oh it’s tightened up a lot more than we expected and it might get very close but Sharma’s still not going to win”. This sort of thing happens.
However the problem is that at the time we all called Wentworth it appeared to be not just callable but extremely callable, way way gone, on its way to 54-46 or more. So if it had been 1% closer at that time we’d be in big trouble now, and yes, we need to find better ways of analysing big new PPVCs to stop this from happening again. I’m intending to run a full booth check for new large PPVCs for all competitive electorates at the next election to highlight those where we might best be hanging out the warning sign. Large new PPVC booth adjacent to an unusually strong area for one party or other ought to be reason to hold off on calling if that party is behind until the thing is counted.
And of course the on the night calls are still in trouble if someone finds 1000 votes under the table.
According to Andrew Tillett in today’s Fin Review, “one senior Liberal held out hope that a large enough influx of postal votes from Israel could flood in over the coming days to help Sharma to an unlikely victory”.
https://www.afr.com/news/backlash-wentworth-and-losing-liberals-play-blame-game-over-defeat-20181021-h16xkx
THE Coalition is considering demanding a full recount in the Wentworth by-election if the margin tightens — a move the government hopes could delay independent frontrunner Kerryn Phelps’ entry to Parliament.
As counting continued yesterday more errors were picked up at a number of booths and prepoll centres following fresh scrutiny on Sunday, which found two significant mistakes at Bellevue Hills and Bondi Beach. By 6.30pm yesterday Liberal Dave Sharma trailed Dr Phelps by 1649 votes.
No new postal votes were counted yesterday but almost 900 were received which were expected to favour Mr Sharma.
The Divisional Returning Officer scrutinises the counting for the Wentworth by-election at the out posted centre, in Alexandra. Picture: Justin Lloyd
About 60 per cent of the total 12,788 postal votes handed out have now been returned. Typically about 70 per cent come back.
The Daily Telegraph understands that given the errors picked up during checks the government would strongly push for a total recount if the margin tightens to within a few hundred.
After this week the House of Representatives only sits for two more weeks and a recount would make it difficult for the new Wentworth MP to be sworn in during that period. But the tactic was not foolproof, with the AEC having denied requests to recount close seats in the past.
Phelps should win by 700-plus votes. Not much of a case for a recount.
OOPS! deleted – wrong thread!
A small batch of postals added … clearly more favourable to Phelps than earlier batches.
J341983 says:
Tuesday, October 23, 2018 at 1:40 pm
A small batch of postals added … clearly more favourable to Phelps than earlier batches.
Yes and less to count – once all the provisionals are done – Sharma is stuffed.
Since this morning the number of postal votes on hand awaiting processing dropped from 905 to 63 and Phelps’s lead shrank by 74 to 1,552.
So those votes only broke something like 54%-46% for Sharma.
12,788 postal envelopes were handed out and 7,789 have been received. If the typical rate of return of 70% holds there may be only another 1,200 postals to come. Even if the rate of return was 80% he’d need to get 80% of the remainder, which just isn’t happening.
Barring some other major mistake in distribution of preferences (which just seems too unlikely seeing they’ve already been checked again) I’d say it’s safe to call if it wasn’t already. And it looks highly likely that the victory margin will be outside the range where there’s any point in a recount beyond delaying Phelps being sworn in.
It’s now looking like Phelps would have won even without Sunday’s corrections. So the decisions to call the result on Saturday were correct, because it really was out of Sharma’s reach (barely).
@J341983
Might be evidence that the late postals are coloured by Morrison’s “campaigning” in the last week.
Today’s postal votes update went 434-360 to Sharma, so he only got 54.7% of them.
Work To Rule says:
Tuesday, October 23, 2018 at 2:18 pm
@J341983
Might be evidence that the late postals are coloured by Morrison’s “campaigning” in the last week.
The John Howard effect
Extremely likely the AEC would refuse a recount request outside the 100-vote automatic window unless the requester identified specific reason (other than the closeness of the margin) to believe that the count was sufficiently flawed that the result might be overturned. Recounts are very time-consuming and hence expensive.
Fortunately the combined vote of the 14 candidates besides Sharma and Phelps is just shy of Phelps’ tally and the postals will not change that, so there should not be a need to wait for the distribution of preferences to be mathematically certain Phelps has won. However I think they will have to wait til the end of the postal vote window next Friday because of the theoretical possibility all the remaining postals will arrive and be for Sharma. I think the number of unreceived postals will exceed the victory margin.
Given that they have to wait on postal votes, surely they have plenty of time to carefully double check?
Any recount would be done after the postal votes are in and counted. Also the counting is, I understand, done in large part by casual workers hired for the election and they would need days of extra work added to do a recount, so it is also a matter of cost.
Which takes me back to what I said earlier about computer assisted counting. You only have to handle each bit of paper once.
[Which takes me back to what I said earlier about computer assisted counting. You only have to handle each bit of paper once.]
WTF? The reason the ballots are counted more than once is to avoid error.
They are counted on election night. They are recounted again the next day. Then it is checked again when the full preference distribution occurs.
This occurs TO AVOID MISTAKES.
I said nothing about recounting Showson. Did you actually read the post I made a while ago that explained it all? What I said just now is that the paper itself only needs to be touched once. You can recheck and recount however many times you want. And as a last resort you can unlock the paper and check each and every paper against its image.
Those declaration votes are going brilliantly – 761 envelopes checked, 761 rejected! See https://tallyroom.aec.gov.au/HouseDivisionPage-22844-152.htm at Declaration Vote Scrutiny Process
@Jack Aranda Yes, seems normal though. Looks like they’re basically safe to disregard.
Yesterday’s postals went 434-360 Sharma with 48 informal, I think. A total of 842 postals processed.
I see they now have 580 postals on hand to be processed. Interesting to see if they break the same as yesterday’s.
… and it looks like 511 of those 580 postals were just processed and Phelps’s lead increased by 21 from 1,552 to 1,573.
Game over
Barry Cassidy has jut tweeted that the Lib scrutineers have left the building.
Liberal scrutineers are said to have abandoned posts in the Wentworth count after a visual look at a new batch of 500 postal votes appears to have them breaking Independent Kerryn Phelps’ way.
Kerryn Phelps was already ahead of Liberal candidate Dave Sharma in the seat by 1554 votes when counting resumed this morning.
Previous batches of postal votes had been breaking Mr Sharma’s way but later votes in the count appear to have gone the same way as the vote on election day – in Dr Phelps’ favour.
That looks like further evidence that the Liberals’ campaigning in the last week backfired badly. There should be absolutely no case now for a recount.