6:57 – Just in case there was any doubt, the Liberal Party’s Simon Kennedy has won this by-election.
I will continue to liveblog but I admit I won’t be as diligent as I might be for a more interesting election.
With three booths reporting preference counts, Kennedy is on 73.2%.
Nominations have been declared for three Tasmanian Legislative Council elections, with polling day on May 4.
Tasmania’s upper house is never fully dissolved, with two or three of the fifteen electorates up for election each year over a six-year cycle.
Now that we have the final voting figures for the City of Brisbane, it was possible to update the analysis of preference flows and the impact of optional preferential voting (OPV) that I published prior to the election.
I have been spending the last few weeks adding a bunch of extra data to the Tally Room data repository, This repository contains tidy data for state and local elections that I have found useful for my data analysis. Often this data is published in a less tidy format, and some bits of information can actually be hard to find online (such as lists of polling place addresses along with geocoding, which is necessary for mapping).
The recent Tasmanian election was very interesting and complex to follow, right down to the final preference distributions, but it also did a good job of translating votes into seats.
The House of Assembly was expanded in size from 25 to 35, and with that became a system more likely to produce a highly proportional result.
Now that the results have been finalised, it’s clear that this was a very proportional translation of votes into seats.
The distribution of preferences concluded today in the final three electorates: Bass, Braddon and Lyons, after Clark and Franklin concluded on Friday.
The final seat result was 14 Liberal, 10 Labor, 5 Greens, 3 Jacqui Lambie Network and 3 independents: David O’Byrne, Kristie Johnston and Craig Garland.
The race in Lyons was no longer in any suspense, and there was little in Bass, where Simon Wood was re-elected by less than 0.12 quotas over fellow Liberal Julie Sladden.
The count is nearing the end, with Clark and Franklin finishing their count today.
Quite a few candidates reached quotas today, with most of the unclear races now resolved.
It now looks likely that Craig Garland will defeat Liberal Giovanna Simpson for the final seat in Braddon, leaving the government with just 14 seats.
It also seems clear that Simon Wood will defeat Julie Sladden for the third Liberal seat in Bass, with no more Liberal votes to be distributed.
NSW Nationals MP Adam Marshall announced his retirement yesterday, which will force a by-election for his state seat of Northern Tablelands in the New England region of NSW.
Quite a lot of counting was conducted today, with Braddon particularly proving interesting.
Any remaining doubt about the party breakdown in Franklin and Lyons has now been cleared up.
The only seats left unclear are:
Bass
We had a lot more counting today in all five electorates.
At this point Clark is entirely clear.
There are two seats where the winning party is not completely clear: