1:33pm – In the electorate of Lyons, Liberal candidate Guy Barnett was elected first, but with only a very small surplus. His colleague Jane Howlett was just 22 votes short of a quota, so his surplus has elected her. She now has a surplus of 172 votes, and those will be distributed next. That shouldn’t take too long. After that, they’ll start knocking out the lowest-ranked candidates.
1:30pm – In the electorate of Braddon, Jeremy Rockliff’s enormous surplus has now been distributed. There has been some understandable leakage from the Liberal ticket, about 5.9%, but they are still on 3.89 quotas so should still win the four seats.
The most interesting consequences are within the Liberal ticket. Gavin Pearce gained the most preferences, pushing him to 1.11 quotas and electing him as the second member. Felix Ellis has also been boosted to 0.78 quotas and Roger Jaensch to 0.44 quotas. This is enough to elect Ellis as the third Liberal and Jaensch is looking very solid for the fourth Liberal seat.
As no Labor candidate has reached quota yet, Pearce’s surplus will be distributed next.
1:27pm – In the electorate of Bass, the second count saw the distribution of Bridget Archer’s 0.55-quota surplus. Unsurprisingly, quite a few of these votes leaked out of the Liberal ticket (about 11%). The biggest beneficiaries were Michael Ferguson and Rob Fairs, which is also unfortunate since they are in the least need of those preferences. Ferguson is now on 0.967 quotas and Fairs is on 0.59.
In the race for the fourth Liberal seat, Simon Wood has widened the gap over Julie Sladden, and indeed Chris Gatenby overtook Sladden. Wood is on 0.228 quotas while Sladden is on 0.187 and Gatenby is on 0.202.
The total Liberal vote has dropped from 3.34 quotas to 3.28, while the Labor vote has climbed from 2.20 to 2.22. The SFF vote is on 0.333, while the Greens are on 1.331.
Geoff Lyons has slightly extended his lead over Jess Greene for the second Labor seat, but only very slightly.
Tuesday 29 July, 1:21pm – The final postal votes were added to the count in the Tasmanian state election this morning, and the Tasmanian Electoral Commission (TEC) has commenced the process of distributing preferences.
I’ll be using this live blog as a chance to post updates as the counts progress. Although I will be driving to Canberra tomorrow and back to Sydney on Thursday, so there will be big breaks in my updates during that time.
For this first post I’m going to quickly summarise changes that have taken place in the primary vote count between when I published this blog post on Tuesday last week and the end of the count today. I have updated the charts in that post with the final primary vote figures, so I won’t bother reposting them there.
In Bass, Geoff Lyons has gained a slight lead on Jess Greene. Sitting Liberal MP Simon Wood has increased his lead against Julie Sladden, and the Greens have gone backwards slightly. The Shooters, Fishers and Farmers also lost a small amount of ground.
There was nothing of significance to report in Braddon.
In Clark, Madeleine Ogilvie has narrowed the primary vote gap against her colleague and rival Simon Behrakis, from 0.11 quotas last week to 0.08 at the end of the count.
In Franklin, Labor MP Meg Brown has slightly extended her lead on Jess Munday. Liberal MP Jacquie Petrusma has significantly widened her lead against Nic Street for the second Liberal seat, from 0.19 quotas to 0.23 quotas.
In Lyons, Jane Howlett fell just below a quota, which should speed up the count since her primary votes won’t need to be distributed as a tiny surplus. She will still be elected almost immediately (indeed she already has by time of publishing this).
Mark Shelton has increased his lead on the other Liberals for the third Liberal spot. Casey Farrell has fallen into fourth place amongst the Labor candidates.
SFF candidate Carlo Di Falco has also lost a small amount of ground.
That’s it for this introductory post. We now have the first distribution for Bass, Braddon and Lyons so I’ll post them shortly.