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Saturday
Tim Wilson has finished the preference distribution in Goldstein 260 votes ahead of Zoe Daniel, after a series of late revisions that drove first drove his lead up yesterday from 129 to 444, before today cutting it back to 170 and then settling on the final margin. These convulsions presumably loom large in the request Daniel has submitted for a recount, but experience suggests the AEC will stand by the 100-vote threshold it set in place in 2008.
Friday
Yet another twist in the saga of Bradfield, which ended with Gisele Kapterian taking the lead at the last and finishing the scrutiny with an eight-vote lead over Nicolette Boele. The Australian Electoral Commission promptly confirmed that this would be subject to a recount, as it does automatically when the margin is inside 100 votes, which will begin on Monday and is “expected to take up to two weeks”. Twenty-two out of Kapterian’s 48-vote gain during the preference distribution came with a second correction from the St Ives pre-poll centre, which had put Kapterian in the hunt the Monday after the election with the addition of hitherto unreported votes to its tally, booting her by 440 votes. The issue this time was apparently a transpositional error in the record of preference flows, causing 11 votes to shift from Boele to Kapterian.
The rest of the movement largely resulted from ballots previously admitted to the count being deemed informal, a process that favoured Kapterian because only the third or so of the vote that was cast for excluded candidates was under consideration, around two-thirds of which went to Boele as preferences. Boele’s hope lies in the recount revisiting the two-thirds of the vote that was cast for the two leading candidates, where the same dynamic is likely to work against Kapterian, who has 38.1% of the primary vote to Boele’s 27.0%. If these votes are excluded in roughly the same proportions as those of the other candidates during the preference distribution (during which Labor lost 23 votes, the Greens 14, One Nation 8, independent Andy Yin 7 and the Libertarians 6), Kapterian will lose about 65 votes to Boele’s 45. The distinctions are fine enough that clearly nothing can be said with certainty – and even if Boele were to emerge with the slender lead implied, there would be a strong chance of a court finding enough routine irregularities to void the result and force a by-election.
In Calwell today, the preferences of independent Joseph Youhana were excluded, nearly 60% of them favouring independent Carly Moore, pushing her well clear of the Liberals into second place. Labor holds a lead of 36.6% to 25.6% that Moore needs to chase down with the successive exclusions of the Greens and the Liberals, on 16.7% and 21.2%, which scrutineers’ reports related through the media suggest is unlikely to happen. Also today, whatever lingering hope there may have been for Zoe Daniel in Goldstein was snuffed out by dramatic revisions that blew Tim Wilson’s lead out from 129 to 444.
12.30pm. My assessment of last evening was evidently too sanguine with respect to Nicolette Boele, whose margin is dropping fast – now down to five votes. Almost all of the correction so far today is down to the St Ives pre-poll centre – the same one whose result was dramatically revised in the Liberals’ favour in the early stages of the check count – where 11 votes have been shifted from Boele to Kapterian. The broader dynamic is that the distribution of Labor preferences and their strong flow to Boele means that votes successfully being contested on grounds of formality are mostly for her.
Thursday
The Calwell preference distribution turned up its first real surprise with the exclusion of independent Sam Moslih, with fully 61.3% of the distribution going to the Greens ahead of the other remaining contenders, namely Labor, Liberal and independents Carly Moore and Joseph Youhana. This pushes the Greens ahead of Youhana, who will be the next candidate excluded. Kevin Bonham suggests this reflects a strong influence of Moslih’s how-to-vote card and/or that of Muslim Votes Matter, which is good news for Labor because both favoured Basem Abdo over Moore. Moore presently holds a 17.5% to 15.3% lead over the Greens, which seems unlikely to be closed with the exclusion of Youhana, given he favoured Moore on his how-to-vote card and the general tendency of independent votes to favour other independents. Assuming that’s so, we are now likely to see Greens preferences push Moore ahead of the Liberals, whose preferences will then produce a final result between Labor and Moore. Moore will need around 67.5% of the preferences shortly to be distributed from Youhana, the Greens and the Liberals.
Proceedings today in Bradfield wore Nicolette Boele’s lead down from 41 votes to 28, with three added to Gisele Kapterian’s tally and ten subtracted from Boele’s. A source familiar with the matter in comments indicates we should now be a good way into the last phase, namely the distribution following the exclusion of Labor with only Boele and Kapterian left standing. If the apparent pattern of movement in favour of Kapterian looks unlikely to eliminate the margin altogether, it does remove whatever doubt there may have been that the it will fall inside the 100-vote threshold for an automatic recount.
Wednesday
Calwell proceeded today through to the eighth count, leaving a remaining field of Labor, Liberal, the Greens and three independents. Carly Moore’s lead over the other independents has widened, and seems likely to be maintained through the imminent exclusions of the Greens and two other independents, together with the elimination of the current 18.5% to 16.4% gap between the Liberal candidate and Moore. Between now and the final count, Moore would need two-thirds of the preferences to overtake Labor.
Today’s preference distributions added 15 to the informal counts in both Bradfield and Goldstein, respectively cutting Nicolette Boele’s lead by four to 41 and increasing Tim Wilson’s lead by one to 129.
Tuesday
End of counting. We’re now six counts into Calwell, with another six exclusions to come. Candidates accounting for 9.1% of the primary vote have now been excluded, with results that probably don’t tell us all that much. Next out will be Legalise Cannabis and One Nation, who will perhaps go relatively heavily to established parties rather than independents, followed by Sam Moslih, whose how-to-vote card had Labor higher than the remaining independents. Most likely, the issue will then be whether preferences from Joseph Youhana, the Greens and the Liberals favour Moore enough to get her ahead of Basem Abdo.
Revisions arising from the preference distribution in Bradfield today have added 11 to the informal vote tally, costing Gisele Kapterian eight votes and Nicolette Boele two, increasing the latter’s lead from 39 to 45.
5pm. The Goldstein count has ended with Tim Wilson up by 128 votes. The AEC relates that the votes still in the system as awaiting processing have Senate ballot papers only. The preference distribution will now proceed, to be followed only by an automatic recount if the margin comes in below 100, though the discretion remains to conduct one even if it doesn’t. Arguments have been made that the population has increased since the 100-vote threshold was established about 15 years ago.
2.30pm. The Australian Electoral Commission will helpfully be publishing updates from Calwell in the form of progress preference distribution results that will presumably be updated with each exclusion. These are a bit hard to read, so I offer the following summary below, showing us up to count four out of twelve. This looks promising for independent Carly Moore with respect to her prospects of making the final count, with 21.5% of the preferences from the first three exclusions having gone to her. However, the marginal nature of the candidates excluded so far is such that these figures are unlikely to offer much insight as to whether Labor will receive enough preferences to get from their 30.5% primary vote to 50% at the final count. If it is Moore who comes second, she will need about two-third of preferences (and Labor one-third) from all other candidates.
Monday
The last batches of votes in Bradfield kept true to the contest’s epic form, with independent Nicolette Boele taking the lead at the last to end the scrutiny 39 votes ahead. But it doesn’t end there: the formal distribution of preferences will proceed throughout this week, almost certainly to be followed by the recount that proceeds automatically when the margin is inside 100 votes, so Liberal candidate Gisele Kapterian has at least some hope that proceedings turn up errors substantial enough to reverse the result. Kapterian began the day 43 votes ahead, then moved to 50 ahead when absents broke 29-22 her way. Boele’s breakthrough came when postals broke fully 125-56 her way, consolidated when declaration pre-polls favoured her 111-90.
A recent recount precedent missing from yesterday’s summary was Clive Palmer’s win in Fairfax in 2013: at 36, his margin on the indicative two-candidate count was very close to Boele’s, but it was reduced to seven during the preference distribution and then inflated to 53 on the recount. An informed source in comments notes that recounts have become less prone to produce changes since the initial recheck became a routine part of the procedure in 1984, and court rulings established legal precedents about formality, most notably in relation to the seat of McEwen in 2007.
In Goldstein, Tim Wilson’s lead is down from 254 to 206 after postals broke 94-60 and absents 76-62 to Zoe Daniel. The AEC records 332 envelopes awaiting processing, of which Daniel would need two-thirds to land in her column to get to automatic recount territory.
Sunday
With the deadline for the arrival of late postals having passed on Friday, there are two seats that can still be regarded as in doubt, barring extraordinary late developments. One is Bradfield, where today’s counting will account for 260 declaration pre-polls, 104 postals and 66 absents (UPDATE: Outstanding postals revised up to 191). Some of these will be deemed invalid and a handful will be informal, but as many as 380 will be added to a tally on which independent Nicolette Boele trails Liberal candidate Gisele Kapterian by 43 votes.
The counting of these votes will be followed immediately by a full distribution of preferences. Should the margin land inside 100, as seems extremely likely, this will be followed by an automatic recount. A review conducted for the Australian Electoral Commission in 2014 helpfully reviews the history of recounts, which provides at least some level of information on how much the dial was moved by 11 recounts going back to 1958 (see pages 24 and the very last page). A recount for Bass in 1998 was something of an outlier in increasing Labor’s winning margin from 16 to 78. Including the one recount conducted since – for Herbert in 2016, which increased Labor’s margin from 8 to 35 – a typical recount seems to make about 20 votes’ difference to the final result.
A recount would seem to be the only remaining chance for Zoe Daniel in Goldstein, who trails Liberal candidate Tim Wilson by 206 votes with 332 remaining to be processed: 172 declaration pre-polls, 100 postals and 39 absents, plus 21 provisionals that may all be disallowed. Even getting to the 100-vote threshold requires stretching the arithmetic here, but the returning officer can use their discretion to require a recount even if the threshold isn’t reached.
The other unknown is the seat of Calwell, which I have not been making the effort to follow on a blow-by-blow basis, since the point at issue is that there’s no way of knowing which out of as many as four candidates will make the final count along with Labor. The only thing that can be said for sure is that Labor win the seat if it’s the Liberal candidate, but it’s quite a bit more likely to be an independent. Such questions can only be answered by a full distribution of preferences. With only 154 votes remaining to be processed, this will presumably begin later today.
Then there’s the Senate, where the pressing of the button on the final results is still as much as a fortnight away. I have a post below with my latest updated assessments on how that is likely to play out.
Anyone have any idea what’s going on with the count in Bullwinkel? The declaration vote scrutiny track suddenly vanished with no explanation from that seat (and Gorton and Fraser, but notably not Longman despite the remaining uncounted vote being zeroed out there).
Morning. I like to think it was the final day of counting for Bradfield. But….I think WB is correct. How long do recounts normally take? Is it a week?
In case this hasn’t been shared already , I concur with Ben Raue on this observation.
https://www.tallyroom.com.au/60577
Saw a Nicolette Boele bumper sticker on a car in front of me today. The car drove slowly and frustrated me. A Harbinger ?
Today is Bradfield day!
Will Teals wi Bradfield and Goldstein?
Will Teals win Bradfield but lose Goldstein?
Will Teals lose Bradfield but win Goldstein?
Will Teals lose Bradfield and Goldstein?
Interesting day.
Vensays:
Monday, May 19, 2025 at 9:37 am
Will Teals wi Bradfield and Goldstein?
Will Teals win Bradfield but lose Goldstein?
Will Teals lose Bradfield but win Goldstein?
Will Teals lose Bradfield and Goldstein?
Interesting day.
_______________________________
Are we going to see a diagram Ven?
What’s the delay – 400 votes should have been counted already.
It was raining earlier tho
They are working in the Bradfield counting house –
Another 7 postals found
437 all up to count
Looking back, over the last week, the counts seem to be updated from about 10:30 onwards.
Postals to be counted are still growing. Up to 191 now (so 517 all up).
The Nairobi chancellery diplomatic bag has arrived…
If they break 54.5% to Boele she will be in the lead.
Hope she’s had her hair done for the impending win.
Counting in Bradfield to begin at noon.
I understand that counting and sorting out the right 2PP final count is a difficult business, of which I only have the vaguest of notions. Although who wins in Bradfield Calwell etc is of interest only for the candidates themselves, the parties and us tragics hanging upon every vote, and so the 2 weeks that have elapsed is neither here nor there. However, if the election and the fate of a government were hanging in the balance I wonder if there could be anything done to speed things up a little, without compromising the integrity of the counting process?
Edit:…I mean Albo in Rome ATM having talks with world leaders has the strength of being a reelected Prime Minister to speak with authority…..If he were merely caretaker PM at the moment, these talks would be viewed by other leaders as being much less consequential
Albo currently has 50 more Bludgertrack seats than his opposition. I suspect other word leaders might be asking for hints.
Gisele Kapterian leads by 50 votes. Abc now.
Bradfield – Batch of 51 Absents counted, Lib lead up +7 to 50 (got 57.4% of the batch), with the following to go:
– 12 Absent
– 259 Pre Poll
– 190 Postal
– 461 Total
The Libs might squeak home in Bradfield. With a teal lookalike candidate. Certainly Mundine would have lost. I wonder if Kapterian is a “moderate” like Tim Wilson ie not really.
Boele has done significantly better than 2022. If she loses will it be:
1) That stupid comment made to a hairdresser. Blustery outrage fodder for her opponents, but stupid and not just in giving them ammunition.
2) If commenters at the SMH are to be believed, the fact she and supporters became annoying by being too ubiquitous and insistent.
3) The donkey vote.
4) The fact she didn’t number other squares on the HTV card leading to more informal votes.
What it won’t be due to is worthy Liberal vision and policies…that’s as fanciful as pink unicorns or nuclear power being rational for us.
To hammer the informal issue, the % of informal ordinary votes on the day is much higher than postals, despite officials supposing to tell people to number every square.
2022: Ordinary 3.7%, postal 3.08%
2025: Ordinary 5.5%, postal 3.95%
Big jump on the day and much more than the difference.
I found her HTV card from 2022 on a post about the conundrum for independents in numbering other squares. She seems to have put ? in the other squares but didn’t name candidates and got the number of candidates wrong.
This time she gets the candidates right but no ? in the squares. Has it made a difference? Who knows.
https://johnmenadue.com/post/2022/05/preferences-confusion-compounded/
I’d go with reason 2, Nicko.
The entire “shadow member for Bradfield” schitich sounds good in a media article but to real world voters it come across of being full of yourself. And the 3 or 4 campaign offices when you are simultaneously saying the major parties have too many campaign resources is just plain hypocrisy – voters weigh all that up
Alpha Zero @ #7 Monday, May 19th, 2025 – 9:36 am
Hands clapping.
I looked at several other districts that have been in dispute or had 3CP preference counts done (Blaxland, Goldstein, Kooyong, Calwell) and every one of them had a higher informal rate for day-ofs than postals. And as I noted on a prior thread, the informal rate in adjacent Mackellar was much higher than Bradfield (7.76%) and Sophie Scamps still won by 12,000 votes. This has the distinct aroma of copium.
Very close elections are invariably overdetermined; you can come up with 10 different but-for events that could have flipped the outcome.
Slow Hands Clapping more like it
True Believer @ #23 Monday, May 19th, 2025 – 12:22 pm
The grass grows, the paint dries, the pot boils and the last votes are tallied.
@disasterboy:
“In case this hasn’t been shared already , I concur with Ben Raue on this observation.
https://www.tallyroom.com.au/60577”
Ben Raue has at least got consistency on his side for his attacks on the current voting system – unlike most of his Greens friends it can’t be said that he only showed up disliking it when it worked against the Greens this time and not when it worked for the Greens last time,
However, I need to point out the suggestion Australians would actually love to have minority power-sharing Parliaments is not borne out by the facts. His own former mob the Australia Institute did some polling on this before the election:
https://australiainstitute.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Polling-brief-Power-sharing-parliaments.pdf
and buried the pertinent part by not mentioning it in their press release. Go to page 6. The netsat for “a hung parliament would be good for Australia” is -21.2 with only a 7.4% strongly agree. Greens voters (quelle surprise, because they thought it would be a hung parliament with them as the kingmaker) have the strongest vote for strongly agree…. at 21.9%.
This ought to put paid to the idea that there would be any community acceptance of any radical change to Australian democracy to prevent there ever again being a majority government.
Australia wants a system that ideally produces a clear winner in the lower house. Needing to negotiate through the Senate is fine, but Australians do not have the time or inclination for the kind of unstable horse-trading coalitions of small parties that rule the roost in many European democracies.
I would also add that what we’ve mostly seen here is a rise in people voting 1 for “community independents”, teal or otherwise. The Greens went backwards, Trumpets got less votes than the UAP, One Nation is up a little bit but last time they had a couple of scandals which probably held them down.
Besides question marks about the degree to which in many cases the community independent vote is inflated and the Labor vote deflated by tactical voting, the bigger point here is that the community independents succeed because they are perceived as local voices for a specific community.
A switch to huge multimember electorates (You can’t do a 5 person federal electorate without it encompassing over half a million people and being way beyond any definition of a local community; and even worse, how do you do a 5 person regional seat without it being ridiculously broad, in some cases the entire rural population of a state would be sharing one seat. Tasmania would become basically one seat) is the antithesis of the community independent movement.
As for the guff about safe seats, most multimember seats would probably end up being extremely safe, almost stasis-locked. Look how far the vote needs to swing to shift state Senate results out of the standard Senate alignment of three left and three right (generally being two Labor, one Green, and either three Coalition or two Coalition and one One Nation). Only massive swings in these seats will move the needle at all.
I have done no work at all on whether this would actually advantage a Labor/Greens government or not. My comments here are entirely agnostic to the end result. I just think proportional representation and multimember electorates in mainland Australia are solutions to a problem that the vast majority of Australia doesn’t agree is a problem, and that in fact forcing permanent minority government and forcing an end to community-size seats that can be represented by community independents would be hated by the majority.
A note to the above – I read the wrong column and Greens voters (who as I said, imagined a hung parliament with the Greens as kingmakers) DID go for a hung parliament by majority, not just 20%. The overall netsat was still as I said.
Ven says: Monday, May 19, 2025 at 9:37 am
Will Teals wi Bradfield and Goldstein?
Will Teals win Bradfield but lose Goldstein?
Will Teals lose Bradfield but win Goldstein?
Will Teals lose Bradfield and Goldstein?
Interesting day.
~~~
It’s guaranteed that Teal supporters will be disappointed one way or another, the question is how disappointed they will be.
Bradfield feels possible (not holding my breath though) and Goldstein will narrow, but with no chance for Daniels. If Zoe Daniels wins Goldstein I will eat my dirty shoe.
Otherwise, the Teals will just have to hope 2028 will be better for them (a decline in Labor votes might help them in Grey, Forrest and other 3CP races)
“Bradfield – Batch of 51 Absents counted, Lib lead up +7 to 50 (got 57.4% of the batch), with the following to go:
– 12 Absent
– 259 Pre Poll
– 190 Postal
– 461 Total”
5 pre-poll and 2 postals now removed from that tally without changing the margin. I assume they were disputed votes which have now all been rejected.
No further counting in Goldstein yet from where it was in William’s summary above.
I think we have passed Peak Teal.
If the Liberal Party find any kind of leadership and policy program better than what was on offer from Dutton (which is a very low bar), they should expect to get a swing back to them from the Teals in 2028.
‘A watched pot never boils’ – the finalisation of the Bradfield count.
Fun fact: This saying is attributed to Benjamin Franklin:
Amongst many other callings, Franklin was a noted diplomat and during his time as United States envoy to France he was directed by the King to write a report on Franz Mesmer’s controversial theory of ‘animal magnetism’. In the report, published in 1785, Franklin included this text:
“Finally another Breakfast is ordered. One Servant runs for fresh Water, another for Coals. The Bellows are plied with a will. I was very Hungry; it was so late; “a watched pot is slow to boil,” as Poor Richard says.”
Actually, Franklin ought to have written “as Poor Richard might have said”, as the proverb isn’t found in any of the Poor Richard almanacs. That’s a moot point however, Franklin and Poor Richard being one and the same.
Of course, Franklin was also a celebrated scientist and would have been aware that watching a pot has no effect on how long it takes to boil. Like many of the most effective proverbs, this one is poetic rather than literal.
https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/watched-pot-never-boils.html
Arky
Well said about proportional representation. I agree with everything you’ve mentioned there. I mean, we already have proportional representation in the Senate, and I don’t hear anyone bar the odd political scientist claiming we should have that in the House as well. A hearty no thank-you to PR, not that it will ever get anywhere.
Changes that I see are more likely are: Optional preferential voting and / or an end to compulsory voting. I’m sure the Coalition would seriously look at either or both of those options should when they get into power again. I’d be against it, but I wouldn’t put it past them to try and pass those proposals. The other is an expansion of the House, we are certainly due, and have 14 Senators / state. Then you should get a 4-3 split per election, so the winning party should come with doing better in the Senate, unlike now when its mostly status quo bar truly bad / poor performances.
As for the counting, any update on Calwell?
@YaramahZ
Well, Calwell has no declaration votes left to count, so I assume they’re now setting up the process of distributing preferences.
Amongst all the postulation on the the voting system, I haven’t seen any comments on the number of House of Representatives seats.
The Standing Committee report following the last election noted the we need about 216 members to get back to one person, one vote.
1 vote counted every 6 minutes. To be sure to be sure.
I’m hearing that postals have put Boele 19 votes ahead.
@Timmy
The issue with doing that is the policies that are needed to get back the small-l liberal vote will cause problems on the right wing.
And that right wing has the numbers in the Liberal Party’s branches and on their executives.
The fact we are here waiting on the last handful of votes in *Bradfield* , where the Liberal Party got 71% of the vote in 2016 with 61% first preferences is a sign that a whole bunch of people in one of the Liberal Party’s crown jewels have decided the Liberal Party is not who they want to vote for.
WB – just wow. And I went and drank my last Hawkes lager. Might have to drop into Dan’s again !
Wow, that would be something like 68% for Teal over the outstanding postals.
Well, I’m not seeing it on the AEC page. I’ll believe it when I see it.
Nathan says:
Monday, May 19, 2025 at 2:30 pm
Wow, that would be something like 68% for Teal over the outstanding postals.
______________________________________
Maybe they did not hear about the hairdresser.
I believe in WB Timmy.
…and it’s now on the AEC
Boele ahead by 19 with 268 votes left to count per AEC
Kind of hilarious proclamations of “peak Teal” … there are certain political realities and yes, ceilings for indies.
Also worth noting most of them got swings to them.
If anything, overall, this election solidified the Teals.
Bradfield – Batch of 181 Postals added TCP, Teal gained 69 to now lead by 19 (got 66% of the batch), with the following to go:
– 12 Absent
– 253 Pre Poll
– 2 Postal
– 268 Total
@kevin Hewitson:
“Amongst all the postulation on the the voting system, I haven’t seen any comments on the number of House of Representatives seats.
The Standing Committee report following the last election noted the we need about 216 members to get back to one person, one vote.”
I was going to say straight up to 216 in one go is too much, but then I imagined how much of a pain it would be to add say 30 now and 30 in another 3 elections.
Maybe they should just add 50 seats in one go, legislate to do it in 2 elections’ time and get the AEC cracking on how the new map would work, with plenty of time for objections processes etc.
ABC shows the 19 lead.
Ceilings can be raised, and lowered, and broken through.
Boele ahead by 19, as WB predicted.
Libs need the rest to break for them by 54% to get back in the lead (the bulk are the remaining PrePoll). FWIW – Both candidates have had batches of Pre-Pools break their way over 54%.