Yesterday’s final result in New South Wales was a bit of a surprise, with One Nation closing a primary vote margin of 0.21 quotas. Even after One Nation won another senator in Western Australia on Thursday afternoon, the gain they had made in WA wouldn’t have been another to do the same in NSW.
Prior to the election, I drew attention to the differences between my calculations and those of the AEC for a number of non-classic seats that gained new areas during the redistribution. Originally I had a list of 14 affected seats, but one of them (Nicholls) has reverted to a classic contest.
We are now getting to the point in the election count where all of the primary votes appear to have been counted. We don’t have all the preference data yet – Bradfield is obviously still in play, the two-party-preferred count is not quite complete, and we don’t have 3CP or distribution of preferences data outside of Calwell. But now that we know how many votes were cast, we can analyse the level of turnout, and how many people voted early, and voted with a particular voting method.
I had the opportunity today to visit the Bradfield recount, thanks to being appointed as a scrutineer. I did not attempt to challenge any ballots, but this gave me the best way to see how the process works. I was thinking of doing a podcast, and I may do that at some point if I get to interview some of the scrutineers, but for now I thought I’d summarise what I found in a blog post.
The vote count is now getting to a point where pretty much all primary votes have been counted, even if we don’t have all of the preference counts yet. So that means we can now begin to analyse the informal voting trends – where it went up or down, and what some of the causes could be.
Monday 4:38pm – As everyone had called, the Liberal Party has lost their third seat in South Australia’s to Labor’s Charlotte Walker. That is a 4-2 split. It’s worth remembering that traditionally these 4-2 splits are rare. Prior to 2025, Labor had gained two 4-2 splits (with the Democrats the fourth “left” senator) in NSW in 1990 and 1998, two in Tasmania in 2007 and 2010, and one in Western Australia in 2022.
One of the big stories of 2025 has been the rise of independents. There was a notable increase in the number of independents who stood at this election, but that in itself is not the most important factor. There is a tremendous range in how well an independent might poll, and how serious their campaign might be.
Today’s booth map covers two neighbouring seats in southern Sydney, both of which flipped from Liberal to Labor in 2025.
The AEC finished the distribution of preferences for Bradfield late on Friday night, after a fascinating day that started with teal independent Nicolette Boele leading by 28 votes and ending with her 8 votes behind. This was a shift of 48 votes from Boele’s 40-vote margin at the end of the indicative 2CP count on Monday afternoon.
This has automatically triggered a recount, as the margin is less than 100 votes. The recount will commence on Monday.
For today’s post I am looking at how the Muslim vote changed, using some techniques I’ve previously used to look at voters of Chinese and Indian ancestry in past votes.