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Saturday night
A batch of postals in Narungga broke 21-18 in favour of One Nation over Liberal, putting their lead at 47 – which is significant because it may well conclude the count (notwithstanding that a solitary vote at the Moonta booth got shifted from One Nation to Labor, for one reason or another). The deadline for late arrival of postals was the close of business yesterday, and full preference distributions will apparently begin in some cases on Monday. SUNDAY MORNING UPDATE: The Kadina EVC tally has been revised to remove 21 votes from One Nation, reducing their lead to 26, which together with the Moonta change suggests we may not be done with rechecking. Heysen’s small number of Electoral Visitor/Mobile Declaration Votes increased the Liberal lead over Labor from 264 to 288, but there remain uncounted vote categories in that case. Nothing worth noting changed in Morphett, and we’re closing in on a week since a new vote got added to the count in MacKillop.
Friday night
ECSA’s preference throw between One Nation and Labor finally swung into action in Hammond today, and it can now be confirmed as One Nation’s second seat, with the two parties evenly placed on the primary vote and One Nation getting about 60% of preferences. Yesterday I registered surprise that the number of “polling day declaration votes” was as high as 1698 – I’m not told this was very likely a data entry error and these votes belong in a different category (polling day absent ordinary votes would be my guess).
With all sorts of new vote types added to the count, One Nation’s lead over Liberal in Narungga today was cut from 147 to 46, almost entirely as a result of a 159-57 break in electoral visitor/mobile declaration votes. I imagine that doesn’t leave much: probably only one last batch of postals. Each of the three batches of these has slightly favoured the Liberals, in slightly dimishing degree: 512-457 on Wednesday, 598-572 on Thursday and 220-214 today.
Similarly, various categories of vote were added in Morphett, suggesting that loose ends are now being tied up and we are near a final result, leaving the trailing candidate hoping for some sort of anomaly turning up in the full preference distribution. In this case it’s Liberal member Stephen Patterson, whose deficit against Labor candidate Toby Priest narrowed today from 293 to 259.
The Liberal lead over Labor in Heysen is out from 156 to 254 after they got the better of a 1054-1010 split in early voting absents broke 1054-1010 and 250-186 from a second batch of postals. That probably sees off any chance of a Labor win, and my system is the only thing extant that’s allowing for the possibility of preferences allowing the Greens to overhaul first Labor and then Liberal.
A curiosity of the past week has been the lack of any progress in the count for MacKillop, which my system rates an almost but not quite certain One Nation win over the Liberals. Nothing has been added since the polling booths and early voting centre counts were completed, which was probably on Sunday or Monday.
My system has uncalled Light, where Labor’s win probability fell fractionally below the 99% threshold after postals 1016-939 in favour of One Nation. Labor leads by 538 votes though, and by this stage of the cuont my system is allowing for more outstanding votes than we are actually likely to get.
Thursday night
Disappointingly, there is still no sign of the Labor-versus-One Nation count that could settle the issue as to which of the two will win Hammond. There were around 3000 postals and “polling day declaration votes” (which turn out not to be what I thought they were, since otherwise there would not have been 1698 of them) and they leave the two almost dead level on first preferences. It can thus be inferred that whoever gets the most preferences will very likely win the seat. The only other regional seat with a Labor-versus-One Nation two-candidate count is Ngadjuri, and in that case One Nation is getting about 60% of them. The main difference between the two is that 10.0% of the vote in Hammond has gone to Airlie Keen, whose how-to-vote card had Liberal second, One Nation sixth and Labor second last. So it seems unlikely that the preference flow here will be radically different from Ngadjuri, which makes me confident in my system’s assessment that One Nation will very likely win the seat.
The Liberal lead over Labor on the two-candidate count in Heysen increased from 54 to 156 after the first batch of postals broke 911-576 to Liberal and the first batch of absents broke 928-704 to Labor. The Greens did poorly on postals, as always, and causing their deficit against Labor on first preferences to increase from 0.9% to 1.6%, which they will need to close on preferences, three quarters of which will be from One Nation, to make the final count against the Liberals. The most proximate useful example I can find from the federal election is the seat of Adelaide, where the Greens got 20.2% of preferences when One Nation was excluded (this included One Nation’s 4.02% primary vote and another 1.76% they picked up on preferences) and Labor got 17.64%. It is for this sort of reason that my three-candidate estimates are giving the Greens an even money chance of closing the gap, but things may be very different in the context of a greatly increased One Nation vote. Whether they would be better placed than Labor to defeat the Liberals at the final count is another open question. I would also reiterate my point about ECSA persisting with a Liberal-Labor two-candidate count and the likelihood that they have made an informed decision in doing so.
In Morphett, Labor candidate Toby Priest’s lead over Liberal incumbent Stephen Patterson increased today from 34 to 293 after a second batch of polling day absents broke 592-459 and a first batch of early voting absents broke 553-427. To close the gap, Patterson will need outstanding two-thirds of postals to split about 57-43 in his favour, as compared with the 53-47 he got from the first batch, and to break even on whatever else remains oustanding.
A second batch of postals in Narungga behaved similarly to the first in breaking 598-572 in favour of Liberal over One Nation, reducing the latter’s lead from 173 to 147. However, the Liberals now have less runway in terms of postals, each of the two batches having accounted for about a third of what’s likely to be the total, and federal precedent suggests absents are more likely to favour One Nation.
Wednesday night
Counting today progressed for the first time (at least out of seats I’ve been watching closely) beyond election day and pre-poll voting. Antony Green relates that ECSA will shortly begin a Labor-versus-independent count in Kavel and a One Nation-versus-Labor count in Hammond “after testing how preferences are flowing from third and fourth placed candidates”, which in both cases is consistent with the conclusions of my system’s preference estimates. At some point tomorrow, my projections in these seats will flip from using these speculative estimates to ones based on the fresh two-candidate counts. As things stand, my system rates it likely but not certain that independent Matt Schultz will prevail in Kavel and Robert Rylance of One Nation will do so in Hammond. UPDATE: Having thought about that more carefully, ECSA is essentially telling us Matt Schultz is going to win in Kavel – his issue was whether he survived to the final count, which ECSA plainly thinks he will. The progress of late counting in these seats has not been of particular interest, as the flow of preferences is almost certainly the black box that holds the secret of the results.
After my system spent the days after the election calling Narungga for One Nation candidate Chantelle Thomas, it is now clear that the result will in fact be extremely close between Thomas and Liberal candidate Tania Stock, as per the consistent view of the ABC. The two-candidate count has caught up with the first preference count and Thomas leads 173. Stock made up 55 on the first batch of postals, which should account for about a third of them. In conventional contests, late-arriving postals tend to be better for Labor then earlier ones, but I cannot offer a view on what pattern they follow between Liberal and One Nation, if any. The biggest categories of vote that remain entirely uncounted are absents and out-of-district early votes, on which One Nation tends to do better than the Liberals, although this can vary according to local circumstance. So the best I can offer is the reliable stand-by that you’d rather be ahead than behind.
Today’s counting in Morphett turned a four-vote lead for Liberal member Stephen Patterson to a 34-vote lead for Labor candidate Toby Priest, with postals favouring Patterson 512-452, absents favouring Priest 225-158, and Priest gaining a net 29 votes on rechecking of pre-polls. The good news for Patterson is that there should be another 2000 or so postals to come, though as noted, the first batch is typically the best for Liberal candidates. Rechecking Heysen today cut the Liberal lead over Labor in the two-candidate count from 69 to 54, but there are as yet no non-ordinary vote types. So far as my results system is concerned, the bigger question is whether the Greens can overtake Labor and make the final count. The projection in my system giving the edge to the Greens is based on fairly careful observation of historic precedents, but it seems to be a minority view. It could be significant that there has been no suggestion from ECSA that they are considering pulling their Liberal-Labor count, as they may well know something about how preferences are actually flowing that I don’t.
Tuesday night
I’ve made two significant changes to my results system: widened its error margins so it will be more conservative in calling seats, and made estimated preference splits between Liberal and One Nation more favourable to the former, which no brings my estimates closer into line with the ABC’s. These factors have as much weight as the progress of today’s counting in the update that follows.
The fresh One Nation-versus-Liberal preference count in Narungga, which so far encompasses 10 of its 33 booths, had a lot to do with my decision to wind back my estimates of One Nation preference flows: I formerly had One Nation leading 55-45 based on estimates, but applying real-world preference data winds it back to 51.2-47.8. Unlike the ABC’s, my system is still calling the seat for One Nation, but I’m slightly nervous about this. One Nation has been downgraded from winner to strong favourite in MacKillop, which is due to the aforementioned changes to my system rather than the One Nation-Liberal two-candidate count, of which we are yet to see any results.
For the same reason, my One Nation win probability in Hammond, which was not quite being called before, has been dialled back slightly while remaining over 90%. This is one of four seats where there is no indication of a fresh two-candidate count: ECSA advised yesterday that in these seats it was “analysing where certain preferences may flow to be in a position to make a call”, though in the case of Hammond it’s difficult to say how the final count could be anything other than One Nation versus Labor.
The progress of today’s check count in the one conventional in-doubt seat, Morphett, offers a useful case study of the savings provision in action. Changes to the various candidate’s primary vote tallies were in no case greater than five, but on the two-candidate preferred count, Labor and Liberal were both up by about the same amount – 83 and 79 votes respectively. It would explain a lot if most of these were saved one-only One Nation votes, divided evenly between the two main contenders as per the party’s registered tickets.
Rechecking today in Heysen offered little insight into the key question of whether Labor or the Greens will make the final count against Liberal member Josh Teague, and what chance the Greens will have of prevailing if it’s them who make it. If they don’t, the two-candidate count tells us Teague holds a narrow lead over Labor that I would think likely to survive late counting. We are similarly none the wiser in Kavel, where the result depends on an order of candidate exclusion, such that minor changes in the various candidates’ first preference shares offer little insight into the like result.
The fresh Labor-versus-One Nation preference count in Light has removed that seat from the doubtful column, with Labor headed for a clear win with help from a strong flow of Liberal preferences. Casey Briggs of the ABC relates that ECSA has done “an indicative preference throw in the early voting centre in Finniss to identify if Lou Nicholson will be overtaken by Labor”. This found that she gained rather than lost votes relative to Labor on preferences, which eliminate any suggestion that Labor might thwart her. So I’ll be removing those two seats from my watch list.
Monday night
Since most of the doubtful seats are so for the want of an appropriate preference count rather than because we know for a fact that they are close, today’s rechecking and gap-filling did not tell us anything terribly momentous. The one case that might have been an exception is the conventional Labor-versus-Liberal contest of Morphett, but all we saw there today were minor changes to the existing count from rechecking.
ECSA has now scrubbed the results of 33 redundant two-candidate preferred counts as it moves into the check count phase, most or perhaps all of which it ceased updating after election night. As well as rechecked primary votes, we are now seeing fresh two-candidate counts with appropriate candidate pairings, only 14 of which are unchanged from those used on election night. Most importantly, this means we will soon be seeing Liberal-versus-One Nation results in Narungga and Light and an independent-versus-One Nation count in Stuart, though by my and the ABC’s system called the latter for Geoff Brock today after he received 59.2% of first preferences out of the 6134 added from the Port Pirie early voting centre. So far though, fresh TCP count figures have only appeared in a handful of booths in seats where the winner is not in doubt. There are four exceptions where new counts will not be conducted as it remains unclear as to who the two leading candidates will be, each involving in-doubt seats: Finniss, Hammond, Kavel and Ngadjuri (though my system is calling the first of these for the independent, a situation I explained at length in yesterday’s update).
I posted a fairly detailed comment in this post’s discussion thread on the question of savings provisions, which has generated some further commentary involving Antony Green among others. This will cause One Nation votes that numbered one only box to remain in the count with their preferences allocated as per a ticket pre-registered by the party. The provision is obviously not specific to One Nation, but is particularly salient in their case as quite a few of their voters apparently voted in this fashion after misinterpreting the how-to-vote card. This will result in votes that are currently being excluded from two-candidate counts to be admitted during the check counts, but as I explain in the comment, I don’t expect this to amount to much. Nor do I buy the idea that One Nation has perpetrated some great outrage by making use of the provision, as argued by both major parties and an editorial in The Advertiser this morning.
If you’re a Crikey subscriber, you might care to note my commentary piece in today’s edition.
Sunday night
There are eight seats whose late counting I’ve identified as worth following, though it’s more possible that seats that are currently off the radar will be on it if fresh two-candidate counts and other quirks of late counting throw up surprises. In a lot of these cases the incremental back and forth of late counting will actually be beside the point: what are really needed are two-candidate counts for the appropriate candidate pairs, and the Electoral Commission is holding off making announcements on that score until the counting of early voting centres, of which four are still to report first preferences after counting on Sunday, are concluded. No new votes were added today in Heysen and Light, and only 46 remote mobile booth votes were added in Stuart, so there is nothing on those below.
Morphett. My system was calling this for Labor on the night (not sure about the ABC’s), but that changed today when the seat’s early voting centre, which added 6861 votes to the 8998 votes cast on election day, recorded only a 1.6% swing to Labor compared with 7.7% for the election day votes. I should stress here that the historic data for early voting centres that is used as the basis for such calculations is imprecise, because results for early voting centres were not actually published in 2022 – they were bundled together with postals, absente and everything else as “declaration votes”, and I and my ABC equivalent had to find a way to estimate how they all broke down. In any case, Liberal incumbent Stephen Patterson now leads Labor candidate Toby Priest by 12 votes. I would usually expect postals to cause late counting to favour the Liberals, but that’s by no means certain.
Narungga. My system is calling this for One Nation’s Chantelle Thomas, while the ABC’s projects a tight race between Thomas and Liberal candidate Tania Stock. As of a few minutes ago, this was because my system had Stock falling out of the preference count before independent incumbent Fraser Ellis, which I now recognise was mistaken because it failed to factor in that Labor had Ellis last on its how-to-vote cards. It now does so for a different reason, which is that the ABC’s estimate of how preference will split between Thomas and Stock are a lot more favourable to Stock than mine are. No doubt the ABC expects a higher adherence of Ellis voters to the how-to-vote card, which has Stock second. Only a fresh TCP count will tell.
Finniss. I’m reasonably comfortable with my system’s prediction of independent Lou Nicholson as the winner here, but it needs watching because the seat is something of a special case so far as my results system is concerned. This is because it’s a three-candidate model and here we have a result that may be decided by who finishes third and fourth. The leaders on the primary vote are Liberal incumbent David Basham on 27.0% and One Nation’s Greg Powell on 22.0%, followed by Nicholson on 19.3% and Labor on 17.3%. The latter gap narrowed today with the addition of the seat’s early voting centre, from 20.5% to 17.7% yesterday to 19.3% to 18.0%, and independents don’t usually do well on postals, none of which have been counted yet. However, the main factor here is likely to be preferences, notably from the Greens on 6.4% and independent Bron Lewis on 4.3%, and I still think it likely these will keep Nicholson ahead. The Greens’ how-to-vote card had Nicholson second, and she got more than twice as many preferences from the Greens as Labor did in 2022. Preferences from independents tend to favour each other, barring strong ideological differences that don’t appear to apply in this case. If she does remain ahead of Labor, she will surely get enough of their preferences to move to One Nation and make the final count against the Liberals. Having looked at this carefully for the first time, I now believe I’m short-changing Nicholson on One Nation preferences — I have splitting 60-40 in favour of Liberal, when they went 78-22 the other way in 2022, albeit that this was with One Nation running a how-to-vote card than favoured her rather than an open ticket as per this time. Even with the 60-40 flow, I’m still getting Nicholson defeating the Liberal by 53.8-46.2 at the final count.
Hammond. The addition of the seat’s early voting centre didn’t fundamentally change the situation here, which is One Nation will win at the final count over Labor unless my preference estimates are substantially awry, which we won’t know about without a fresh TCP count.
Ngadjuri. I’ve been calling this for One Nation’s David Paton all along, but the ABC only did so today after a weak result for Liberal member Penny Pratt from the Two Wells early voting centre caused her to fall behind Labor in its preference projection, which my system was doing because it was estimating weaker preference flows to Liberal. This has caused it to be the first seat projected by the ABC as a One Nation win, and I’ll be having no more to say about it unless late counting turns up some manner of surprise.
UPDATE: It’s been noted that I missed Kavel, where my system swung yesterday from favouring Labor to independent Matt Schultz, presumably because the latter had a strong result at the Mount Barker early voting centre. Ultimately though, this is one that’s going to require a full distribution of preferences before we can really be sure of anything. I’ll discuss the situation in greater detail in tonight’s update.
Of the 4 PHON lower house contenders, some of them seem like they’d make decent local MPs or grow into the job, but I don’t think any of them are remotely up to being opposition leader. Malinauskas may see an advantage in that if their seat count is tied with the Liberals.
The fact that this is an even worse polling error than the 2019 federal election in terms of 2PP (2019 Federal Election: 2.5% more Liberal | 2026 South Australian Election: 4.5% more Liberal) is just insane to think about. Thankfully they got the winner right this time, but jeez.
I was thinking about TCP matters and then went to look up something about postal voting but then got distracted by this.
Voting tickets
https://ecsa.sa.gov.au/voting/counting-the-votes-for-the-house-of-assembly
“At House of Assembly elections, candidates can provide ECSA with their preferred order of preferences among all the candidates on the ballot paper. This ‘voting ticket’ is used during the count whenever a voter has numbered some but not all the preferences on their ballot paper, and their preferences match their number 1 candidate’s voting ticket. When this occurs, their ballot paper is ‘saved’ from being informal and is added to the count.”
I was not previously familiar with this practice but it was related earlier than if you just voted “1”, then the ECSA (in arrangement with the candidate/party), processed your ticket as if it were fully completed. I stated my disagreement with this practice, in that the ECSA should not be involved in ascertaining that a voter has voted a certain way, when they haven’t explicitly done so.
Now I read that it can be any number of empty boxes as long as it matches the submitted but undisclosed candidate/ party ticket.
No.
This is not the right way to increase formality.
In a full preference system where the sole instruction is “fill in every box”, a ballot paper marked with a single “1” is informal. The end. It literally could not be any clearer.
The ECSA should in no way for any reason whatsoever be counting a ballot paper as if the voter had completed it to full preferences, when the voter has explicitly not done so. It doesn’t matter if ends up being 1 vote or 100% of votes, whether the preferences are distributed or not; the practice should not exist.
A voter marking a single “1” is NOT identical to the voter directing all their preferences as the candidate/party selects and it should not be presumed that this is so. The highly valid and important goal of increasing formality should not come at the expense of, let’s be absolutely blunt, the completion of the voter’s ballot paper on their behalf so it can be counted as formal.
Under the guise of a savings provision, the use of voting tickets is basically an optional preferential vote turning into a full preference vote for which the preference flow is not disclosed nor (I would suggest) that the voter is fully informed that the practice exists and is happening to their ballot paper.
How are these “voting tickets” any better than the previous federal Senate “group voting tickets” where the voter put a “1” and the vote was sent to wherever the candidate / party directed. The names! From recollection, at least there was a public record of how the Senate votes flowed.
If you want to use this “voting ticket” practice, then be honest, open and transparent about it, not this current semi hidden, vague practice. Have the ballot paper say “If you mark a single 1 in a candidate box, your preferences will be distributed in full in accordance with the candidate’s wishes.” You could get rid of people handing out HTV stuff.
In a full preference system (which this is), a better and genuine savings provision is where someone has made a full attempt at a ballot paper (all boxes complete) and there’s been a (likely unintentional) error such as a duplicate number or sequencing error. Then maybe you do something like exhaust the vote. It’s a modest allowance and would “save” a lot of votes.
If there are concepts or models to reconsider the formality of completed ballot papers papers that may have empty boxes, that’s totally fine. But the current execution is not the way.
ECSA should also massively tighten the rules and requirements for how ballot papers are presented on HTV’s. I showed an example from Adelaide previously with a range of HTV’s next to each other and it was a mess. If you are in a full preference system, any outcome, suggestion, hint or inference to the average voter of putting anything other than full completion of boxes should be disallowed.
ECSA doesn’t tighten the rules. It is an act of parliament and for the politicians to change.
The tickets were introduced as a response to the 1984 Federal election when the new Senate ballot paper caused a vast surge in 1-only voting. As South Australia was implementing the same upper house reforms for the 1985 state election, it adopted this provision as an answer to 1-only voting.
Since 1984, ballot papers across the country have words like “Number all the squares” plastered across them. In every state that uses the divided ballot paper, there is a higher average of 1-only voting, and if you track informal voting back four decades, it always increased when a Senate style ballot paper was introduced. 1-0nly voting has declined at federal elections since the 6-preference instructions were put on ballot papers.
For technical reasons, the last election we have SA ticket vote data for is 2018. At that election, there were a total of 40,067 ballot papers saved, which once included as formal vote, represented just 3.8% of the total formal vote. Of those votes, 28,242 were saved votes for candidates whose preferences did not need to be examined, and 11,825 for candidates who were excluded and needed preferences distributed.
So of the saved votes, 70.5% only counted for a first preferences, and 29.5% had preferences distributed. And many of those distributed votes were in seats where preferences didn’t need to be distributed.
So in 2018, 1.1% of formal votes state were ticket votes with presumed preferences. The highest in any single electorate was 2.2% in Hartley where Nik Xenophon ran and didn’t recommend preferences and had a split registered ticket.
What the ticket voting system means is that compared to every other jurisdiction with full preferential voting, South Austraia has the lowest rate of 1-only informal votes and the lowest rate of votes declared informal for numbering errors.
No other state, nor the Commonwealth, has found a way to lower informal voting despite endless campaigns to number all the squares. South Australia is the only state that has addressed the problem at its cause in a way that allows votes to count rather than be excluded as informal.
The SA savings provisions result in an (admittedly small) number of votes ending up with candidates the voters in question had no idea they were voting for.
Reducing the number of informal votes is a laudable goal, but you’ll have a hard time convincing me that’s a democratic way to go about it.
I imagine after Kavel, the next seat to be called before the end of the day would probably be Hammond where the margin is over 4%.
You argue it is democratic to exclude a vote that could count but is rejected because it lacks a sequence of further preferences that don’t need to be counted. A rule that allows more votes to count is undemocratic but a rule that throws out votes that could count is democratic?
You can argue that it must be done to protect full preferential voting, but don’t turn that into an argument that only full preferential is democratic.
Early Voting Absent Ordinary Votes just dropped in Morphett, breaking 553-427 in favour of Labor and increasing their lead from 167 to 293.
Antony,
I think we might be at cross purposes.
If a vote doesn’t have a full set of preferences filled in, but can remain in the count up to the preferences it does have, that’s fine. For example, if a vote just has a 1, and it’s for one of the candidates in the top two, of course that vote should count because it goes where the voter intended.
My issue is with cases where the preferences run out, but the vote stays in the count according to a party ticket. That’s the undemocratic bit, because the voter has no idea who he or she ended up voting for.
To put it another way, preferences should be allowed to exhaust.
I guess you’re assuming my TPP is right, which it may not be, given the huge chunk of it that’s based on highly speculative estimates rather than actual classic TCP counts. Even if they did struggle with the TPP, no one who it’s possible to please would seriously fault the performance of the pollsters at this election.
Morphett looks like a probable Labor gain to me, so that would put Mali’s seat tally up to 34 seats.
What’s the general opinion on Heysen and how it might turn out?
1487 postals just dropped in Heysen: GRN down from 23.3% to 22.6%, LIB up from 33.3% to 33.8%, ALP little changed, LIB TCP lead over ALP out from 21 to 356.
Democracy Sausage: Heysen is ALP 24% Greens 23% Liberal 34% PHON 15%.
The 3 way is too difficult to call at this stage as PHON will allocate preferences first. Then likely Greens. I think that it is too close to call and could come down to a handful of votes.
Clearly the Libs will now get over the line in Heysen on the postals. Presumably ON wins Hammond although there is no ECSA 2CP figure available yet – but most assumptions about how Liberal prefs will flow point to a ON win. So likely to be a non Government bench of 5 Lib, 4 ON and 4 independent.
And a second batch of postals in Narungga behaved similarly to the first in breaking 598-572 in favour of LIB over ON, reducing the ON lead from 173 to 147. OTOH, the Libs now have less runway in terms of postals — each of the two batches accounts for about a third of what’s likely to be the total — and the federal results suggest absents are likely to favour ON.
Postal votes were brutal for Greens in Heysen and likely ends it for them.
But we still haven’t gotten a read on what PHON voter preferences are like. PHON hate the Greens, and of course there will be conservatives preferencing Liberal.
The Greens’ best hope is that there’s a decent “screw the major parties” vote in there as well that goes their way over both majors. Can’t be ruled out with open tickets.
Too early to call without a 3CP.
Of course Teague winning gets the Liberals to 5 and basically guarantees they’ll be the 2nd largest party in the lower house, Hurn will be opposition leader, and PHON will be on the cross bench. Which some in Labor and the Greens would call a good outcome.
Given the history of libs in SA recently one or more of those 5 may move to One nation in the next year or two.
You heard it here first!
@pied piper Congratulations. You won 3 legislative council seats, and even had a convincing win in Ngadjuri with a very strong chance of victory in at least 2 more House of Assembly seats. How do you feel about this achievement?
Given the history of One Nation members, one or more of their newly-elected members may move out of the party in the next year or two.
I have $10 on one of the PHON quitting by June 2027 to be an independent.
If ON becomes like Reform we probably will see more Tories pulling a Barnaby.
JM From Qld: “pulling a Barnaby” – maybe rephrase that 🙂
@Blue Not John says: Thursday, March 26, 2026 at 5:41 pm
“Postal votes were brutal for Greens in Heysen and likely ends it for them.”
~~~
I might be a bit more ballsy and say that this batch of postals likely ends it for Labor as well. The count in Heysen heavily reminds me of the count in Longman in 2025, where a very close count between a Liberal and Labor candidate shifts heavily in favour of the Liberal as a result of a strong batch of postals breaking for them.
It’s hard to see how Marisa Bell can win Heysen when she’s behind by ~356 votes with 76.4% of the votes counted.
@Holdenhillbilly says: Thursday, March 26, 2026 at 7:12 pm
“I have $10 on one of the PHON quitting by June 2027 to be an independent.”
~~~
I understand your sentiment and I still lean towards it. However, I’m not one to bat for One Nation but I think we live in “unprecedented” times for the party where it’s overtaking the Coalition and is able to translate it’s success in polling into actual seats. Not to mention it achieved decent swings against Labor and Liberals. I’m not sure any new One Nation MPs would willingly jump off the hype train.
It’s down to 156 now.. But this doesn’t matter if she can’t get past the Greens on the 3 CP.
@Holdenhillbilly
Haha, didn’t even consider that when I wrote it. My apologies for the images it conjures up
Votes, preferences and the count. A useful summary for ABC readers.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03-26/sa-election-why-is-one-nation-not-winning-many-seats/106489976
Why One Nation is not winning many lower house seats in the SA election despite its high vote
By Eugene Boisvert
How many millions with over 22% lower house vote will One nation get?
5 million ?
That’s a lot of dosh to poor into Victorian election where they are polling well -bigtime.
Immigrant crime,overcrowding,dud gov,dei opposition it will be on like donkey Kong.
Blue Not John: the other remining chance for the Greens in Heysen is the donkey vote. Aside people who voted for Andrew Granger because they actually knew who he was and liked his policies, votes for him are gonna favour One Nation and then the Greens. Due to that, when ON get eliminated in fourth their preferences will probably be slightly more Green-friendly than the average. It’s a tiny effect but in a seat this tight it might make a difference.
The more I think about Heysen, the more I think Greens could still take it.
While Green voters now very strongly preference Labor, the Adelaide Hills is likely to have more than a few tree tories and Green NIMBYs that preference Liberals (unfortunately I can’t seem to find the traditional 2PP split for Mayo from Green voters to verify). So the baseline for Green to Labor flows may be overestimated.
Meanwhile Labor have traditionally been a non entity there and I would think their voters are more likely to be coming at it from a “left of centre” rather than a “blue collar” perspective – similar to Prahran (where Greens did better off Labor than vice versa). SA Labor have been remarkably non-hostile to Greens (unlike QLD Labor).
Finally as well as the aforementioned donkey vote, I do think PHON doing so well would not just be the far right (preferencing Teague above both Labor and Greens), but an anti major party and anti incumbent protest vote that would favour Greens and go against Labor. Interviews with PHON voters have suggested it’s often a non partisan anti major party vote, similar to the SA Best vote that was strong here in 2018.
I want to believe!
Not if they’re planning on spending the money legally, which would require it be used to cover costs associated with state campaigns.
Labor got 82.5% of Greens preferences in Heysen in 2022, which was in fact very slightly above par.
My info from a sample from Crafers booth is that Greens pref ALP above even that. And not far off v.v.
In Finniss, Lou Nicholson and Labor are pretty close to tied for third at the moment, after Nicholson did relatively badly on postal votes – 18.8% leads 18.5%, a 71 vote gap. Funny thing is, she could come fourth and still win – jump Labor on Green prefs, jump One Nation on Labor prefs, beat Lib on ON prefs. I’d be surprised if that’s ever happened in a state or federal election before – winning from third is rare enough.
While I’m at it, digging around for stuff that has never happened before: two sitting MPs ran for Ngadjuri (Penny Pratt from Frome and Tony Piccolo from Light), and neither of them won. That can’t be too common. Usually when two MPs run for the same seat, it’s either due to redistributions, or upper house MPs from minor parties trying their luck in lower house seats, eg: Janine Haines (Kingston, federal 1990) or Jim Scott (Fremantle, WA 2005).
Nice that William’s model still have the Greens making the top 2 in Heysen, fingers crossed. Although it would be tough to get over the Liberal if they do
Does anyone know how Animal Justice preferences usually spilt?
See how it plays out
Looks like the legislative council is locked in with just the 1 Green winning there. I guess the government will be able to rely on the Greens or the others as required. I doubt it will be too long till they team up with One Nation’s 3 to pass something
First sign of the TCP count in Hammond: Polling Day Declaration Votes broke 814-714 to One Nation, suggesting they’re getting 57% of preferences, when basically anything over 50% would win them the seat.
Labor now leading by 367 in Morphett. Hard for Labor to lose from there.
Postals counted today have pushed out Teague’s lead to more than 100 in Heysen. Labor’s chances there receding. Liberals likely to hold on
My previous comment was mistaken — preferences from the one booth where they are counted in Hammond are actually splitting evenly, suggesting it’s going to be close.
One Nation state leader Cory Bernardi says his party is ready to form Opposition and would relish the opportunity, predicting a four-seat haul and potential tie with the Liberals. In an interview with The Advertiser, Mr Bernardi said he was advised One Nation would win four seats – the same number as the Liberals have now secured – and should form Opposition if the deadlock remained.
Mr Bernardi said this was because One Nation had secured a higher lower house primary vote at last Saturday’s election than the Liberals – 22.3 per cent to 19.4 per cent. “Of course, it depends on how the results fall, but if there are four seats under the One Nation banner and there are four seats under the Liberal banner, then we have a very legitimate claim to become the formal Opposition on the basis that we achieved a higher number of primary votes,” he said.
https://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/south-australia/state-election/one-nation-state-leader-cory-bernardi-puts-hand-up-to-form-opposition-ahead-of-liberals/news-story/82f4cff1fb7725042cbdb58883699754
Were starting to become a 3 party system now where you have Labor for the broad centre-left, you have the Liberals for traditional conservatives, and you have One Nation for the right-wing populists. I wonder how long this party system would last for?
The parties are saying Labor will win Morphett and Libs will win Heysen, which at least will spare us Bernardi wanting ON to be the Opposition.
If its a draw on lower house seats, it goes to the governor for a decision. Libs would argue they have more MPs with the upper house and ON would argue they got more votes.
It’s only a convention.
So One Nation is claiming, in the event they and the liberals have the same number of seats, that they should be the official Opposition on the basis they received more votes.
Some extremely clever and insightful* poster on this very thread predicted they would do that. Another first for Poll Bludger.
* Not to mention modest, of course.
Both the ABC’s and my system have just called Hammond for One Nation.
So that’s now 2 seats that are locked into the One Nation column. I’m guessing that the last seats that are in doubt are now just too close to call.
TBM,
Well, yes. That’s what ‘in doubt’ means.
My system has uncalled Light, just, presumably because of postals breaking 1016-939 to One Nation.
Not always. One Nation may end up winning Hammond pretty comfortably, but it wasn’t being called for want of information about preferences, which we’re now getting. Whereas the preferences in MacKillop and Narungga (and Light, if you like) are known, and they are indeed too close.
Labor has enough lower house members that some of them could leave the Labor caucus and be the largest group after the rest of Labor, who would still have a majority.
Maybe Liberals and One Nation have to share the opposition duties. Or maybe the independents get to decide.
Early Voting Absent Ordinary Votes broke 417-414 in Narungga, so that’s one less rabbit the Liberals could potentially pull out of the hat there. One Nation leads by 140.
And the Libs are screaming ahead on five seats now.
Antony Green – elections
Narungga continues to narrow. One Nation’s Chantelle Thomas now only 43 votes ahead of Liberal Tania Stock.
Liberal Josh Teague retains Heysen, his party’s fifth seat and guaranteeing the Liberals are the largest opposition party and Ashton Hurn will remain Oppositional Leader. Except in the unlikely case of a deal between One Nation and the Independent.