The Poll Bludger

Click here for full display of South Australian election results.

Some very general observations on the result before diving into specifics. As expected, Labor appears to have won every seat in Adelaide except Bragg, where Liberal member Jack Batty achieved a surprisingly normal-looking result. That involved unseating the Liberals in Colton, Hartley and Morialta, which Labor had held at various points during its previous time in government, together with Morphett and Unley, which it hadn’t. In a great many other seats in Adelaide, the Liberals have been reduced to minor party status, in many places running fourth and in one place even fifth. My system is calling four seats for the Liberals and has them leading in a fifth, making them likely but not certain to retain opposition status ahead of One Nation, who are being called in three and ahead in a fourth.

Labor may not be entirely spared the One Nation lash though, which needless to say has been the other big story of the election. My own preference estimates suggest a knife-edge result in Light, which the long-serving and highly popular incumbent Tony Piccolo abandoned for an unsuccessful run in Ngadjuri, presumably to help Labor win both seats but in fact putting them at the risk of winning neither. The ABC’s preference estimates give Labor a slightly more comfortable margin of 2.0%, but we really won’t know until we get a fresh two-candidate count, which hopefully ECSA will conduct over the coming days. Also in northern Adelaide, Elizabeth and Taylor have also gone from being safe Labor seats against Liberal to marginal ones against One Nation.

My system is calling three and very nearly four regional seats for One Nation, though none are being given away by the ABC. However, it’s difficult to see the Liberals closing their substantial primary vote deficits in MacKillop and Narungga, and in neither case is the independent incumbent competitive. I’m a little less confident about my system’s call of Ngadjuri for One Nation, but Liberal incumbent Penny Pratt will undoubtedly have a difficult time overcoming Labor to make the final count, as she’s effectively tied with them on the primary vote at present and the minor parties whose preferences will decide the issue are mostly of the left. If she can’t manage it, my system is undoubtedly correct in projecting that her preferences will give the seat to One Nation over Labor.

I am just about giving Hammond to One Nation, where Liberal member Adrian Pederick has fallen to a fairly distant third, with his preferences set to decide the result for One Nation over Labor, each of whom have about 27% on the primary vote. Neither my system nor the ABC’s are writing off One Nation’s chances of deposing independent Geoff Brock in Stuart, where we’re both estimating margins for Brock of 4.5% and applying very conservative error margins due to the complications involved in projecting an independent-held seat that has gained territory in a redistribution. Brock would have to be rated a pretty clear favourite though.

There are two other seats that my system rates as in doubt. Heysen is rated a three-way contest between Liberal, Labor and the Greens: the latter would have to close a small deficit against Labor to make the final count, but my system gives them a solid chance mostly by giving them more preferences than Labor from One Nation, based on observation of preference distributions from the federal election. It’s a close run thing though, and should they fall short, ECSA’s notional two-candidate count shows Labor leading Liberal in two-candidate terms by all of two votes, although late counting will presumably favour the Liberals.

Kavel looks fiendishly complicated, with no candidate polling higher than 23.9%. That candidate is Labor’s, who my system is rating the favourite, but its preference assumptions wouldn’t need to be too far wrong to overturn this. ECSA’s two-candidate count shows independent Matt Schultz will win if he faces off against Labor in the final count, but to do that he will have to get ahead of One Nation, who he slightly leads on the primary vote. However, my system assumes Liberal will drop out before all of the above, which I think very likely, and has more of their preferences going to One Nation than to Schultz, which is little more than a guess.

Those who were following my results late last night may notice some changes to the projections, which are due not to late counting but my reconfigurations of who the last three candidates are likely to be and changes to preference estimates. The system has been dealing with combinations of candidates that hadn’t previously been encountered, and in some cases was splitting preferences evenly where it had no defaults to fall back on. I haven’t been keeping score, but I believe my system had been calling Kavel to Matt Schultz on this basis, and I’m certain it wasn’t calling Finniss for independent Lou Nicholson, as it’s now doing. It’s more than possible that I’ll unearth another anomaly or two when I review the matter in the morning, or more likely afternoon.

I’m not exactly sure what can be expected today in the way of counting, but around half of the early voting centres were evidently unable to complete their primary vote counts by the end of last night, and only a few reported two-candidate numbers. There has been a fair bit of talk about the impact of South Australia’s unique savings provisions that cause ballots that have not been fully numbered to be deemed to conform with preference tickets pre-registered by the parties in question. This is of particular interest due to One Nation how-to-vote cards that show only a number one for the One Nation box and advise voters to fill out the rest in order of preference, which some may have misinterpreted as meaning a single number constituted a valid vote for One Nation.

However, the effect of this in late counting will be minor. One Nation lodged multiple registered tickets with the effect that its saved preferences will divide evenly between Labor and Liberal. Only in the four seats where it was included in the notional two-candidate count (Chaffey, Giles, Schubert and Wright) are its own soon-to-be-saved votes currently withheld from a published count, and none of these are in doubt. Furthermore, the differences in the number of votes reported on the primary vote and two-candidate counts is not all that dramatic, so the number of votes should in any case not be over-estimated.

Before I finally turn in for the evening, my first look at the Legislative Council result. Only 219,769 first preference votes have been counted, which is barely a third of the lower house count total, so this must be considered highly preliminary. It currently looks very much like Labor four, One Nation three, Liberal two and Greens one, with one more seat in doubt. With Labor on 4.4 quotas and the Greens on 1.4, one would think their collective surplus of 0.8 quotas would mean a further seat for one or the other. That would add up to nine or ten seats for Labor in the new parliament along with two or three for the Greens, for a combined total of 12 out of 22. The Liberals would have six, and One Nation’s new cohort of three would be supplemented by former party member Sarah Game, whose Fair Go for Australians party was one of a number of right-of-centre concerns that accomplished very little at this election.

Click here for full display of South Australian election results.

I’m otherwise engaged this evening, so won’t be offering anything in the way of live commentary, but hopefully the Poll Bludger live results system will tell you everything you need to know. As well as the main landing platform linked to above there is also a map display that will colour in as results are reported to reflect who the system deems to be ahead or to have won, respectively indicated with a lighter or darker shade.

Each individual seat page comes with projections (which start from assumptions about who the three leading candidates will be, which in some cases I may have to change on the fly if I find time) and results at swings at booth level, displayed in both tabular and mapped form (for the latter, click the “active” button at the bottom of the page). As always, I’m crossing my fingers hoping this will all work okay. I have made life harder for myself by implementing a new method for determining win probabilities, which would ideally have been rolled out at a less complicated election. Hopefully its errors will be on the side of caution – a may implement some rather crude fudges on the fly to make it so if that doesn’t seem to be what’s happening.

This will be a landmark election night so far as the Electoral Commission of South Australia’s reporting of the results is concerned, as early voting centres will be counted on the night for the first time (though experience suggest some of them will handle too many votes for them to finish the job before the close of business). What were formerly reported in one line as “declaration votes” will now be reported at an appropriate level of complexity – early voting centres no longer count as declaration votes, and will be reported on a location by location basis, and the rest will for the first time be reported separately as postals, absents and the best. This complicated matters for those of us who need to produce datasets of previous election results to match against those that will be reported tonight for swing calculation purposes, but is undoubtedly a welcome development in the long run.

An added layer of challenge lies in the fact that the ECSA offers no indication as to which candidates it has selected for the notional two-candidate preferred counts, which are usually provided to the media on a confidential basis. A couple of seat pages are in fact not working as they should be because one of my tables says one thing about who the candidates will be another one says another, but I believe I’ve geared things so it will correct itself when the appropriate candidates can be identified. If however individual seat results pages continue to misfire, the likeliest explanation (though my no means the only one possible) will have something to do with this issue. In an ideal world I would be free to patch things together, but as it stands I will be otherwise engaged, so it’s a question of fingers crossed.

Naturally all of this involved a vast amount of unpaid work, so if you believe that situation should be rectified, your donations are gratefully received through the “become a supporter” buttons at the top of the site and the bottom of each post.

Two late results from South Australia make it four out of four polls from the last week of the campaign with One Nation ahead of the Liberals:

• Courtesy of The Australian, Newspoll has the Liberals on 16% of the primary vote, their consolation being that this is two points higher than the Newspoll result from the start of the campaign. Labor is down four to 40%, One Nation down two to 22% and the Greens steady on 12%, and others up four to 10%. Peter Malinauskas is down two on approval to 65% and up four on disapproval to 31%, while Ashton Hurn is respectively up four to 43% and steady on 35%, for all the good the improvement seems to have done for the Liberals. Malinauskas leads 64-22 on preferred premier, in from 67-19. Newspoll’s policy appears to be not to provide two-party numbers when One Nation is running second. The poll was conducted last Thursday to this Wednesday from a sample of 1048.

• A DemosAU/Ace Strategies poll for InDaily has Labor at 37%, significantly moderating the 43% recorded in its last poll four weeks ago, with One Nation up four to 23%, the Liberals down one to 17% and the Greens down one to 11%. Peter Malinauskas records personal ratings of 49% positive, 31% neutral and 20% negative, while Ashton Hurn is respectively at 21%, 58% and 21%, and Cory Bernardi is at 20%, 44% and 36%. Malinauskas leads Hurn 56-21 on preferred premier. Like Newspoll, the poll was conducted last Thursday to this Wednesday, the sample in this case being 1242.

Three of this week’s four polls have broken down their results by inner metropolitan, outer metropolitan and regional, as detailed on the table below, and the story they tell is consistent enough that no more need be added to my earlier analysis of the Fox & Hedgehog result, which concluded that Labor could potentially sweep the board in Adelaide, Bragg being the most likely Liberal hold-out. The situation in the regions is a good deal harder to read, with One Nation needing to overcome Labor preferences and a number of strong independents to make anything out of its commanding primary vote. The report by David Penberthy in The Australian accompanying the Newspoll result rates its strongest chances as Narungga, Hammond, Flinders and Ngadjuri.

UPDATE (Resolve Strategic): One last poll comes from Resolve Strategic, which it describes as “experimental” on the grounds that respondents were met with an interactive AI voice. Their caution is no doubt informed by the fact that the poll has an even higher One Nation vote than everyone else, at 28%, with Labor coming in well below par on 32%, the Liberals about evens at 18% and the Greens on 10%. The poll was conducted on Monday from a sample of 1112.

With four days to go until polling day, Fox & Hedgehog has the first South Australian state poll in nearly three weeks, and it suggests the campaign period has if anything widened One Nation’s lead over the Liberals, while doing little to dent Labor’s ascendancy. Labor is on 38% of the primary vote, down two on the last Fox & Hedgehog poll in early February, with One Nation up one to 21%, the Liberals down one to 18% and the Greens down one to 11%. Two-party preferred measures have Labor’s leads narrowing from 63-37 to 59-41 against One Nation and from 61-39 to 60-40 against the Liberals, with the Liberal lead over One Nation unchanged at 53-47. A three-party preferred measure has Labor down two to 52%, One Nation up one to 26% and Liberal up one to 22%. The poll was conducted March 6 to 16 from a sample of 1008.

The breakdowns include regional classifications of inner Adelaide, outer Adelaide and regional South Australia. With due regard to the small sample sizes, their results can be summarised as follows:

• The primary votes in inner Adelaide are Labor 45%, unchanged on 2022, while the Liberal vote is halved to 19%, with the Greens little changed on 13% and One Nation eclipsing them even here with 15%. This pans out to a Labor two-party lead over the Liberals of 65-35, for a swing of about 7.5%. That would be comfortably enough for Labor to win Unley (2.2%), Hartley (3.6%), Morphett (4.5%) and Colton (4.8%), but not quite Bragg (8.2%).

• The results for outer Adelaide are Labor 44%, up two to three points from 2022, Liberal 12%, down nearly 20, Greens 11%, up about two, and One Nation 20%, with Labor given a 66-34 lead over the Liberals, a swing of nearly 6%. The only seat the Liberals hold here is Morialta, where the margin is 1.4%. Presumably the strength of the Labor primary vote would fortify them against any threat from One Nation.

• One Nation leads the field in regional South Australia with 28% of the primary vote, with Labor on 22%, down about five on 2022, Liberal on 25%, down about 12, and the Greens on 8%, with others at 17%, much of it presumably going to independent incumbents. This would be unevenly distributed, but it surely suggests One Nation is unlikely to emerge empty-handed. Its strongest prospects are presumably Flinders, MacKillop, Chaffey, Narungga and Mount Gambier, which would raise the prospect of official opposition status. The Liberals are nonetheless credited with regional two-party leads of 51-49 over One Nation and 53-47 over Labor, the latter pointing to an adverse swing of 9% that presumably doesn’t bode well for them in Kavel.

Leadership ratings put Peter Malinauskas’s approval at an unchanged 52%, with his neutral rating up four to 26% and negative down two to 19%. Ashton Hurn is respectively up five to 25%, down one to 36% and up two to 15%, with 24% now never having heard of her, down six. Malinauskas’s lead as preferred premier is barely changed, out from 54-22 to 55-22. One fly in the One Nation ointment is that lead upper house candidate Cory Bernardi’s net rating is down from minus four to minus nine: down one on approval to 14%, up two on neutral to 37% and up four on disapproval to 23%.