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Wednesday
The Bradfield recount has been completed with Nicolette Boele 26 votes ahead. Importantly, the AEC reports that its investigation into cases of multiple marks against names on the electoral roll found that only two voters were “likely to have had a second vote admitted to the count”. Should the Liberals (or, in theory, any voter in Bradfield) wish to pursue a legal challenge, they will have to persuade the court that at least 23 errors were made, either to their disadvantage with respect to adjudication of ballot papers or with voters having been wrongly allowed or refused votes.
Tuesday
Nicolette Boele ended the day 27 votes ahead in Bradfield, one down on yesterday. A good result for Boele from the St Ives Chase booth at the start of the day, with six votes knocked out for Gisele Kapterian, was cancelled out later on when Kapterian gained six votes from the Warrawee booth, the first revision in her favour affecting more than one or two votes. That just leaves a handful of votes to be accounted for, which will assuredly be wrapped up at some point today. The largest booth outstanding is Wahroonga with 693 votes – I am told that this is in fact mostly done, with no indication that the result will be substantially revised. There are also the very small Ultimo and Wynyard booths, with 51 votes between them, along with around 185 postals, 160 provisionals and 150 absents.
In short, it seems likely that the present margin will undergo only minor change, in which case the AEC will shortly declare Boele the winner. The question will then arise as to whether the matter ends up in court. The AEC itself can refer the matter to the Court of Disputed Returns (meaning the High Court or the Federal Court if it chooses to delegate the matter), but a media briefing conducted yesterday suggested this was unlikely. The most obvious basis for it to do so involves the incidence of multiple voting being greater than the final margin. Typically the number per electorate has been around 15, but an AEC spokesperson suggested it would be lower than that due to the increased use of electronic certified voter lists, through which it can be determined in real time if a prospective voter has been marked off already.
If so, it will be a matter for the defeated candidate (or perhaps more to the point, their party) to determine if a challenge is worth pursuing. Doing so would almost certainly involve disputing formality rulings, as was done without success by Labor candidate Rob Mitchell in the seat of McEwen in 2007 (who went on to win the seat in 2010 and has held it ever since). After winning the initial count by six votes and losing the recount by 12 (seemingly the only time a recount has reversed the original result at a federal election), Mitchell argued there were 40 ballot papers ranking him higher than Liberal rival Fran Bailey that had been wrongly rejected, along with one where the opposite happened. After reaching its own conclusions concerning 643 ballot papers that had been reserved for the adjudication of the returning officer, the court revised Mitchell’s losing margin up to 27, and duly rejected his appeal.
The precedent of a court determining a declared result to have been out by 15 suggests the Liberal Party would be strongly tempted to pursue the matter further – although its Queensland equivalent chose not to do so after falling 37 votes short in Herbert in 2016. While the chances of a court declaring Kapterian the winner outright would seem rather slim, it might conclude the proper margin to be below than the number of observed irregularities, causing it to void the result and have the election held afresh.
Monday
Nicolette Boele had her best day yet in the Bradfield recount, the 12 vote lead she opened yesterday widening to 28. Rechecking of nine booths, four of them in the Liberal stronghold of St Ives (reflecting the fact that the recount has proceeded more-or-less alphabetically), knocked 14 votes from Gisele Kapterian’s tally and four from Boele’s, while batches of absents and postals cut five from Kapterian and added one for Boele. This leaves the recount nearly 80% done – the 12 booths remaining to be rechecked (only one of which is a pre-poll centre, and that a rather small one) account for 12,056 votes, on top of which I am told that about 3700 postals, 1500 declaration pre-polls and 500 absents are still outstanding.
Saturday
Good news and bad news for tealdom today, the former being a breakthrough for Nicolette Boele in the knife-edge Bradfield recount. After slowly slipping in counting through most of the day, her one-vote deficit at the start drifting out to seven, Boele’s situation was transformed by the Turramurra pre-poll centre, which knocked out 16 of Gisele Kapterian’s votes and none of her own, pushing her to a 12-vote lead. In total, the recount has cut 82 votes from Kapterian’s tally after preferences and 62 from Boele’s. Out of the grand total of 118,851 votes, still to be recounted are 20 out of 52 election day booths, accounting for 20,322 votes, and two out of 13 pre-poll booths, accounting for 975. It’s a lot harder to say where we are with non-ordinary vote types, except that all but the fairly insignificant provisionals category have been revised, postals apparently on six occasions (though I remain unclear if this encompasses the early and especially strong batches for Kapterian).
Proceedings in Goldstein are finally at an end after the partial recount ended with Tim Wilson 175 ahead, in from 270 at the start of the process, prompting Zoe Daniel to concede defeat. It turns out the 50-vote error alluded to yesterday related to a batch being double-counted (which wasn’t the only time such a thing was found to have happened in Goldstein), rather than the maximal scenario of votes for Daniel having been attributed to Wilson.
Friday
The resolution of the last Senate result today in New South Wales turned up the first genuine surprise, with One Nation’s Warwick Stacey winning a seat that I (and to my knowledge everyone else) had reckoned a sure thing for Labor’s third candidate, Emilija Beljic. After Labor (Tony Sheldon and Tim Ayres) and the Coalition (Andrew Bragg and Jessica Collins) elected their top two candidates with full quotas, the remainder of the pack was whittled away until Mehreen Faruqi of the Greens crossed the threshold to win the fifth seat leaving Stacey and Beljic competing for the sixth. At that point, Stacey led Beljic by 0.886 quotas to 0.823, which preferences from Faruqi’s 0.069 surplus were insufficient to close, Stacey winning at the last by 0.891 quotas to 0.867.
As this simplification of the distribution illustrates, Stacey passed Beljic with the exclusion of Legalise Cannabis one step before the election of the Greens (UPDATE: Kevin Bonham in comments notes it was actually two steps, the previous transfer from Family First’s exclusion having put him ahead), a transfer that included 0.2446 quotas worth of first preferences for Legalise Cannabis and 0.1510 in preferences picked up along the way. My model based on preference flows in 2022 had Labor, One Nation and the Greens gaining very similar shares of preferences with the exclusion of Legalise Cannabis: instead, One Nation gained 0.146 quotas, the Greens 0.123 and Labor only 0.066, the 0.0797 gap between the One Nation and Labor shares pushing One Nation to their 0.024 quota winning margin. However, that is only part of the story of how my model’s projection of a 0.112 quota winning margin for Labor proved out by 0.136 quotas: up to the point of Legalise Cannabis’s exclusion, Labor under-performed the model by 0.046 quotas and One Nation over-performed it by about the same amount. Further insights are available to be gleaned from the full ballot paper data that has already been published by the AEC, though this will have to wait for now.
In the Bradfield recount, Nicolette Boele hit the lead today – but not for long, her one-vote advantage being reversed in the last updates for the day. Debate rages as to whether there is any underlying pattern within changes that have collectively reduced her deficit so far from eight votes to one, with what I would guess to be about 40% of the recount remaining to be done, continuing into today. Updates that looked promising for Boele based on the theory that large numbers of first preferences for Gisele Kapterian meant opportunities for them to be knocked out as informal have in some cases failed to deliver, notably today’s revision for the St Ives pre-poll centre, which reduced both candidates’ totals by one. Thirty-seven of 66 ordinary booths have been recounted, plus I assume all of the absent votes and an unknowable but obviously significant share of the 14,666 postals, but none of the 3405 declaration pre-polls.
The theory of high primary vote disadvantage in recounts has looked good in other contexts, including the Bradfield preference distribution where it played to Boele’s disadvantage by harming her main sources of preferences – and also in the partial recount in Goldstein, which seems to be almost finsihed. Tim Wilson has lost a net 63 votes since the start of the recount to Zoe Daniel’s 36, reducing his lead to 233. The AEC advises we can expect a correction tomorrow involving, among other things, a “change of 50” in favour of Daniel – which could mean a reduction in her deficit to around 183, or a transfer from Wilson to Daniel that would get it all the way to 133. Neither would get her as far as the 100 vote threshold she would need for the AEC to determine if it will keep the ball in play by proceeding to a full recount, though the latter might just about get her within striking range if the tide kept flowing in her favour.
Kirsdarke – all sensible above.
Certainly reinforcing Hughes and Banks for the next 3 years is a must, ditto in relation to Labor’s surprise gains in QLD, VIC and Tasmania.
@ Douglas and Milko
> The above paragraph is only a guess, but knowing many
> people of that younger generation, I do not think I am too
> far off.
>
> I am really interested to hear what others think.
There are lots of things going on within the population of northern Sydney, including generational turnover. It’s hard to believe it but there are voters with no memory of the Howard era and little recall of Rudd & Gillard. Maybe to them, ‘Liberal’ just means Abbott’s madness, budget deficits, corruption and misconduct, rorts and pork-barrelling, sex scandals and Morrison’s rolling clown show.
So I think/feel, with no research or data to inform this, that there are plenty of conservative-minded voters (especially here in Berowra) who really want to see stable and competent government and a calm prime minister. For some of them, the ALP is looking like a natural home.
There is also a growing, diverse mob of voters whose chief concerns are climate and environment. Their preferences are nearly always going to end up with Labor; they wouldn’t touch anything Liberal.
@MMM: Yes, I always feel guilted toward tempering my occasional observations about the perversities that single-member preferential voting can throw up with the inevitable caveat “but, of course it’s way better than plurality voting.” Because that latter point is much more important in the grand scheme of things.
I typically resist that impulse just because my posts are already overly wordy and it’s kind of obvious to anyone who follows this sort of thread, but you should read an implied “this is still a million times better than the moronic FPTP” codicil into everything I say on comparative voting systems.
Kevin Rudd had several 60+ Newspolls in the two years following the 2007 election, and yet he was deposed by Gillard who nearly lost the subsequent election.
On the Liberal side, Holt won a landslide in 1966 with about 57% of the two party preferred vote, drowned the following year, and the Liberals nearly lost the 1969 election (and did lose the two party preferred vote).
A lot can happen in two years, and knowing the ALP, a lot can go pear-shaped VERY quickly.
Timmy says:
Thursday, June 5, 2025 at 8:54 am
Kevin Rudd had several 60+ Newspolls in the two years following the 2007 election, and yet he was deposed by Gillard who nearly lost the subsequent election.
On the Liberal side, Holt won a landslide in 1966 with about 57% of the two party preferred vote, drowned the following year, and the Liberals nearly lost the 1969 election (and did lose the two party preferred vote).
A lot can happen in two years, and knowing the ALP, a lot can go pear-shaped VERY quickly.
_____________________________________________
This is definitely true. However, there are some differences that make it less likely, though not impossible.
1966 was heavily coloured by the times – in particular the Vietnam War, which at that date did not appear to be the clusterfuck that it further developed into. Secondly, Gorton was not Holt and Whitlam was not Calwell.
As far as Rudd is concerned, Albanese is not Rudd. Rudd did a lot of internal damage to a lot of people in my opinion and alienated the party. It was said that the Parliamentary party was more worried about winning the 2010 election with Rudd than losing with him. His subsequent white-anting behaviour validated their assessment of him, even if they brought him back to save the furniture.
That said, Labor was savagely burnt by the events of 2010 and subsequently and are obsessed with avoiding a repeat.
Possibly a better analogy is the current WA government which also won a landslide second term and, at the following election under a new Premier, performed far better than expected when just a reversion to more normal voting patterns were expected.
Contrast this with the Newman government in Queensland which had a massive bout of hubris on winning in 2012 and enabled a sane Labor party to bounce back to government from a telephone booth sized membership.
While anything can happen to undermine Labor’s current ascendancy, nothing that the Government or Opposition are doing at the moment seems to show any other direction than to entrench it.
Bradfield’s declaration of results is now scheduled for Friday at 9 am. Amusingly, this means that it will actually not be the last seat declared; the declaration for the entirely uncompetitive seat of Page isn’t scheduled until 11.
With every declaration going in by midday tomorrow, I suppose the House writs could even be returned before close of business– not sure how long the paperwork typically takes after the final declaration happens.
If there is a disputed return or challenge, does the AEC mark the declaration as qualified
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-06-05/kapterian-bradfield-count-court-legal-challenge-boele/105378714
Would assume you can’t declare something with a challenge still pending, unless the challenge is made after the fact.
Anyone the know the statute of limitations for challenges?
I wonder if the hairdresser will get called as a surprise witness
To the contrary, I do not believe that a challenge can be brought UNTIL the result is declared, as prior to that point there’s nothing to challenge.
I believe the SOL is 40 days from return of the writs, so probably by about mid-July or so.
Yes, the Petition to the Court of Disputed Returns must be filed within 40 days of the date of the writ for the election. Declarations for Bradfield and Page are made tomorrow – I believe these will be the last 2 declared.
In 2022, the writs for the election held on 21 May were returned by the Electoral Commissioner to the Governor General on 24 June.
Presumably the 2025 writs will therefore be returned early next week (maybe tomorrow afternoon?), which is when the 40 day clock for a challenge starts ticking.
The now presumptive MP for Bradfield has been all over the media – 7.30, ABC News Breakfast, Sunrise, Today show etc. In comparison, nothing from Gisele Kapterian, other than a written statement saying she’s considering her options – of course she is, the Liberal Party brains trust are no doubt preparing the grounds for a legal challenge.
This is the same NSW Liberal Party division who think women have become too self-assertive lately ha.
@Democracy Sausage, are you down for a bevvie and feed with Upnorth @ Myself – 6pm 26 June? Meet at the lobby at the Swissotel.
As much as I wish it was otherwise, Kapterian lost. I know this as Sports Bet took my pineapple.
Nathansays:
Thursday, June 5, 2025 at 8:10 pm
As much as I wish it was otherwise, Kapterian lost. I know this as Sports Bet took my pineapple.
=========================================================
So Sports Bet isn’t betting on Liberal lawyers at the Court of Disputed returns then.
I guess not…. but I think their T&C’s are for the election, which Teal won. If there was a challenge, it would result in a new election?
Nathansays:
Thursday, June 5, 2025 at 9:29 pm
I guess not…. but I think their T&C’s are for the election, which Teal won. If there was a challenge, it would result in a new election?
========================================================
I guess so, not sure the Liberals will challenge anyway. I suspect it will come down to costs if they do. If they have lawyers who are willing to do it at little or no cost they might. As i can’t see them wanting to spend to much money on something that has little chance of succeeding. Better off saving the money for the campaign in three years instead.
@Sausage: Well, that makes sense. Unless your name is Donald Trump, going around publicly shooting your mouth off on television can only conceivably hurt you in a legal challenge. If the lawyers could get away with it they’d have Kapterian bound and gagged in the basement of the local Liberal branch office.
As bottomless as the Liberal Party legal purse is, I think that after they pay the Deeming-Pesutto cost that they’d be less likely to drag this one through the full song and dance.
Bimetallic Standard says:
Thursday, June 5, 2025 at 12:08 pm
I wonder if the hairdresser will get called as a surprise witness
++++++
The incident with the hairdresser is nothing to do with the conduct of how the election was administered which is all the Court of Disputes Returns is concerned with.
There’s conjecture about whether the Libs can afford a court challenge, financially and/or strategically. Nobody has suggested any grounds for such a challenge.
The election was conducted properly. The count has been conducted properly. There were no serious objections or controversy in the campaign period, on election day or during the count. The AEC has preempted any complaint about double votes.
If the Libs challenge, they’ll have to allege something improper done by the AEC, Boele’s team and/or a third party. Does anyone have a guess or some insider knowledge about this?
Edgepork
At this stage there will be no challenge is what my confidante tells me. Too much political capital wasted is the quiet word. Also some speculation that the right not supporting as mounting a challenge later this year.
Ofc this could change but a very low probability of going ahead.
It’s official, the final seat has been declared.
Anyone know why Page took longer than Bradfield to be declared?
@True Believer – can your confidante reveal the grounds they would have used, it they had challenged?
@Glen O: Possible that was one of the areas affected by flooding? I know AEC mentioned that Wide Bay was and that was why it was taking a long time to finish up there (just declared yesterday).
The other possibility is that it just took a long time to distribute preferences because there were 11 candidates. Or maybe some combination of the two.
I heard the AEC say that several mid and north coast seats in NSW had to have all their ballots uplifted to various Sydney centres so that staff in northern NSW could attend to flood issues at home.
Where is the 2PP count for Bradfield? Why, oh why is it taking so long? More to the point, why did they start last weekend and then stop? The recount finished almost 3 full business days ago yet still no updates. I would have thought they would want the National 2PP figure squared away
High Street @ #874 Friday, June 6th, 2025 – 4:53 pm
I think that we’ll have to wait for the full AEC Election report for that information, which would probably be expected around July.
Hilariously, at the moment Bradfield is showing on the AEC site as the single most Lib-shifted division in the entire country, thanks to an incomplete and wildly unrepresentative 2PP count there and a glitch in displaying the 2PP swing in Bendigo.
The Mark One Eyeball is still predicting an eventual 2PP of about 47% to Labor in that seat, which would be about a 3.5% swing, in line with the swing Boele herself received and with the swings in surrounding Teal divisions.
“It was a polling booth in Turramurra that broke the deadlock in the battle for the seat of Bradfield.
The initial count had already revealed the tightest federal contest in years, and when it finally concluded, the Liberal contender Gisele Kapterian was ahead of her teal independent rival Nicolette Boele by just eight votes. That tiny margin triggered an automatic recount.
For days Kapterian held on to her wafer-thin advantage, but about 6.45pm last Saturday the momentum shifted. Election officials had just recounted 6400 votes cast at the Turramurra pre-polling station on Bobbin Head Road and the outcome posted on the Australian Electoral Commission website was good news for Boele.
Kapterian had lost 16 votes, putting the teal independent ahead by 12. It was the last time the lead in this see-sawing contest would change, and when the recount eventually wrapped up on Wednesday, Boele had won the battle for Bradfield by 26 votes.”
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/nsw/the-bradfield-booth-that-swung-it-for-the-teals-and-how-the-liberals-lead-slipped-away-20250605-p5m5b3.html
The latter would be because it’s Labor-versus-Nationals now rather than Labor-versus-Liberal, which represents a conceptual difficulty where “two-party preferred” is concerned. Since there is now an apple where once there was an orange, there is no “swing”. They could have achieved consistency at the expense of perversity by continuing to do the count on a Labor-versus-Liberal basis.
Interesting. That seems to be a different glitch than the one that has affected Nichols and Brisbane, where the computers appear to have been fooled by the fact that non-classic 2022 contests converted to classic contests in 2025. Bendigo was classic both times, it’s just that the party of the participant on the Coalition side of the contest changed.
It would seem a fairly simple fix, in seats with both a Liberal and a National candidate, to simply count 2PP to whichever of them finishes higher in the preferencing order, and ignore the difference between the two parties in measuring final swing. In this case the National made the final two; I suppose it might delay the 2PP count a bit if neither Coalition party is making the final two and you have to wait for the distribution of preferences to find the identity of the candidate for whom the indicative 2PP count is going to be conducted. Though I would imagine it’s usually going to be pretty obvious.
James Paterson on Insiders (via The Guardian – I don’t watch it):
“I understand that the New South Wales Liberal party is reviewing our legal options . . . But it is up to the New South Wales division and ultimately, if we decide to make any application in the court of disputed returns to that.”
I’m yet to see or hear any mention of what the grounds for an application might be. I suspect the Libs’ legal advice is that there are none.