Nominations were announced today for the Tasmanian state election. After record-sized ballot papers at the previous election in 2024, they will shrink slightly in 2025. There will be fewer columns on the ballot paper, along with larger fields of ungrouped independents. While ballot papers will be smaller than in 2024, they will still be some of the largest seen in recent decades.
The three-candidate-preferred (3CP) count has become a topic of more interest in recent elections because of close races where the dynamic of who makes it into the top two can decide who wins. But it’s also an interesting statistic which can tell us more then is revealed by the two-party-preferred vote, while being a bit simpler than primary vote statistics.
There were 21 seats in 2025 where an independent candidate made the two-candidate-preferred count. For today’s post, I want to explore what we can tell about those voters from their other voting patterns. For voters who ended up with the independent in the two-candidate-preferred count: how did they cast their primary vote, and where did they rank Labor or Coalition?
The two-party-preferred vote is the simplest statistic we have in Australian elections – just two numbers that always add up to 100%. While it has reduced relevance for calculating the result in some seats, it still has predictive power and also plays a role as a sort of barometer of the relative popularity of the two major parties. Despite the increase in the vote for minor parties and independents, the choice of who forms government is still binary.
Late on Monday, the AEC transitioned the election results website to its final archive form. You can now find the results at results.aec.gov.au, and the previous link no longer works.
There is probably enough fresh data to fuel a whole week of blog posts. I am planning to return to the question of the national 2PP and 2PP preference flows by party, as well as some deeper analysis of the 3CP trends across the country.
Earlier this month I published a blog post which discovered that the average 2CP margin of victory has not actually been getting smaller at recent federal elections. I didn’t end up including the chart in the post, but I also identified that the numbers of marginal seats hasn’t been going up over time, despite a number of formerly-safe seats now becoming marginal non-classic seats.
Last month I posted about the increase in the proportion of votes that were cast early (postal, pre-poll and remote) as opposed to those cast on election day. 55.7% of votes were cast early, with just 43.6% casting their votes on the day.
For today’s post I am looking at how those voters actually voted, and how it’s changed over time.
Now that we have a complete two-party-preferred vote for all of Australia, we can look at the distribution of seat margins and swings across the country.
For this post, I have produced a number of charts which show the distribution of seats by two-party-preferred result, and also by two-party-preferred swing. I also attempt to chart out the two-candidate-preferred swings in non-classic seats, or at least those which have a valid swing compared to 2022.
It has barely been two weeks since the no confidence motion passed, and just over a week since the Tasmanian state election has been called, but the candidates are coming out of the woodwork very quickly.
I have now updated my election guide to feature those candidates announced so far.
I’ve previously posted a number of times before about the dataset I have compiled of election results since 2004, adjusted for 2025 electoral boundaries.
Most recently, prior to the election, I specifically did a comparison of the 2007 and 2022 electoral map: two elections with similar two-party-preferred votes and a similar number of seats with a two-party-preferred majority for each major party.