Papua New Guinea goes to the polls next month to elect the national parliament, and for the first time since 1977 there has been a redistribution of electoral boundaries. Seven existing electorates have been split in half to create seven new seats. Another six electorates will be split in half in 2027.
Ben is joined by Maholopa Laveil from the University of Papua New Guinea to discuss the upcoming Papua New Guinea national election, with voting scheduled for most of July. We discuss PNG constitutional structures, election procedures, how the parties work and political geography.
As the minor party and independent vote has increased, we have seen the voting method used for the House of Representatives take on more complex and difficult to predict features. Nearly every MP has been elected without a majority of the vote, and an independent or minor party made the final count in one sixth of all seats.
Now that all of the votes have been counted, I wanted to look at the various methods of casting a ballot, which methods have become more popular, and how the two-party-preferred vote varies depending on when someone casts their ballot.
For the first time in modern Australian history, a majority of votes were cast before election day, with COVID-19 accelerating a long-term trend away from election day voting.
The two-party-preferred count was effectively finalised last night, with the final figures counted from Cooper and Melbourne in inner-city Melbourne. There were 26 electorates where the final two-candidate-preferred count was not between Labor and the Coalition (non-classic), so a separate count was needed to produce a two-party-preferred figure.
Today I’m looking at booth results across the ACT. I’m starting with a two-candidate-preferred map, but probably the Senate race is more interesting, where independent candidate David Pocock polled over 20% and knocked out Liberal senator Zed Seselja.
This map is the largest booth map I’ve published, and it shows the two-candidate-preferred results in eleven of WA’s fifteen seats, and the swings in ten (there being no valid 2CP swing in Curtin).
I’m not sure what exactly I want to focus on with this map, but overall it does show the dramatic scale of Labor’s victory in Perth, where they picked up four extra seats, holding nine out of eleven seats on this map (along with one Liberal and one independent).
Gilmore is one of the two closest seats in terms of the final preference count, and is unique for being one of the few seats the Coalition had a feasible chance of gaining from Labor at the election.
Today’s map shows the two-candidate-preferred vote by booth in Fowler between newly elected independent Dai Le and her opponent, former Labor senator Kristina Keneally.
The map shows booths won by Keneally in red, and booths won by Le in purple.
For the rest of this week, each day I’ll be featuring a booth map of a seat or a handful of neighbouring seats, starting today with the three seats won by the Greens in inner Brisbane: Brisbane, Griffith and Ryan.