Ben is joined by Kevin Bonham to wrap up the Tasmanian state election. We discuss the close undecided races, what might come next for parliamentary negotiations, and what it means for May’s upper house election.
In this post I’m going to run through each seat in depth, explaining who I think has won and which seats are in play.
To summarise, at the moment I have 15 Liberals, 10 Labor, 5 Greens, 3 JLN and two independents in the lead.
There’s still a bunch of votes to count, and preferences will need to be distributed before some seats are decided, but there’s still a lot to say.
There was a very clear shift away from Jeremy Rockliff’s Liberal Party, who have suffered a swing of 11.9%, but little of that went to Labor, who have only gained a swing of 1%.
Polls have just closed for the Tasmanian state election. Polls will also close in the Dunstan state by-election in South Australia in half an hour.
I won’t be liveblogging here tonight because I’ll be appearing on air on ABC Radio’s election night broadcast. You can hear it on ABC Hobart and ABC Northern Tasmania local radio, as well as ABC News Radio. The show will start at 7:30pm.
While I won’t be posting here, feel free to chat about the results in the comments.
As has become a regular story, there was an uptick in voters choosing to vote using other methods than turning up at a regular polling place to vote at the last Tasmanian state election.
Tasmania’s voters have been less likely to switch away from election day voting than in most other jurisdictions, but the direction of travel is the same.
Analysing preference flows under a Hare-Clark system like that used in Tasmania is a lot more complex than a single-member electorate system. It isn’t simply a matter of a series of candidates being knocked out until two remain – different parties benefit from preferences at points in time before later giving away preferences of their own, and parties have multiple candidates with preferences that don’t always stay within the party ticket.
Ben is joined by Maggie Perry from 6 News Australia to discuss the results of council elections and by-elections in Queensland. We mostly focus on the Brisbane City Council results, and also touch on the results of the two state by-elections and other local council elections.
For this post, I’m not going to dwell too much on individual races and where they are up to, but instead look at broader trends. I’ll do another post today or tomorrow about the close races and what we’re waiting to see.
There were quite a few votes that weren’t counted last night. Almost 600,000 votes were counted for the lord mayoral election, but barely 450,000 primary votes were counted for the council election, and only about 60% of those votes had preferences distributed.
6:18 – There was a big uptick in pre-poll voting yesterday (which is pretty standard). More than 5% of all voters cast their vote on Friday, which means that 25% of all enrolled voters cast a pre-poll vote. Remarkably this means that the total pre-poll share has jumped from 23.7% in 2020. It does look like postal votes has dropped, but we don’t yet have a final figure.
Ben was joined by William Bowe from the Poll Bludger to discuss the Tasmanian state election. We run through the five state electorates one by one, and discuss what we’ll be watching for on election night.