Stephen Mayne's chances for the final spot in the North Metropolitan Region (Victorian 2010 Legislative Council election) Thursday, December 2, 2010

There has been much speculation over the winner of the fifth and final seat in the North Metropolitan Region of the Victorian 2010 Legislative Council election.

Most of the speculation was due to the ABC, which provides an election calculator that showed the fifth spot was likely to go to Crikey founder Stephen Mayne, who received 1% of the vote and then looked to be riding favourable prefences from other parties to the required quota of 16.7%.

The closed-sourced ABC calculator however, has several limitations, such as poor handling of ungrouped candidates and also ignoring leakage of preferences by below-the-line voters. It does format the results very nicely though (I'm stilling working on that)

So on Wednesday night, I took the current results from the VEC results website and put it through pycassandra, using below-the-line predictions provided by Stephen Mayne himself. The results are a bit different. Due to preference leakage, especially from Joanne Stuart in Group A, Mayne can not quite overhaul the final Liberal Candidate, and so pycassandra predicts the final makeup to be 2 ALP, 2 Liberal, 1 Green.

This morning, the Victorian Electorial Commission (VEC) began a recount of the votes, which means the tallies may change.

The Count:

Elected MIKAKOS, Jenny of Australian Labor Party from quota
Elected GUY, Matthew of Liberal Party from quota
Elected ELASMAR, Nazih of Australian Labor Party from quota
Elected BARBER, Greg of Greens from quota

At this point, no candidates had quota, so started eliminating

Eliminated 19 very low ranking candidates

Eliminated WHITEHEAD, Adrian of Whitehead (quota: 0.0054)
Preferences: 61.4583% flows to BHATHAL, Alexandra Kaur (Greens), 19.7917% flows to MURPHY, Nathan (Australian Labor Party), 9.375% flows to ONDARCHIE, Craig (Liberal Party), 9.375% flows to MAYNE, Stephen (Group C),
This Round: (candidate | group | quota)
ONDARCHIE, Craig | Liberal Party | 0.6543
MURPHY, Nathan | Australian Labor Party | 0.5937
PATTEN, Fiona | Australian Sex Party | 0.2029
KAVANAGH, John | Democratic Labor Party | 0.1665
CONLON, Andrew | Family First | 0.136
BHATHAL, Alexandra Kaur | Greens | 0.0754
MAYNE, Stephen | Group C | 0.0623
JANSON, Vickie | Christian Democratic Party | 0.0495
STUART, Joanne | Group A | 0.0304
ARCHIBALD, Kevin | Country Alliance | 0.0287

The rest of the count is after the jump...