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...
Stephen Mayne's chances for the final spot in the North Metropolitan Region (Victorian 2010 Legislative Council election) Thursday, December 2, 2010
Election 2010 Tuesday, September 7, 2010
Ironically I was doing other stuff during the election period rather than focusing on the Senate. Basically, the place split as expected.
The most interesting results were in Victoria, Tasmania and the ACT.
In Victoria the Democratic Labor Party (DLP) won a seat from Family First, meaning the Coalition only won 2 seats in the state. In Tasmania the ALP/Greens won 4 seats, leaving the Coalition with only 2. The other states split 50/50 left/right. And in the ACT, the Liberal's candidate was almost pushed to preferences, setting up a fight with the Greens in the next election.
The Sex Party, Liberal Democratic Party and the Shooters Party all had decent swings to them. The Sex Party, the political arm of the Eros Foundation, in their first Senate election, ran a highly visible and well funded (well, it was funded!) campaign. The Liberal Democratic Party was probably the beneficiary of being a stable entry with a solid niche (the libertarian vote) as well as a name change from the Liberty and Democracy Party to the much more popular Liberal Democrats name ... containing not only the word Liberal, but the word Democrat and also the popular UK party name in the title.
The Senate now swings from left to right in July next year. This means the Coalition only have 7 months to annoy the government until the Greens get their turn.
Quotas are too high in the Senate.
Kernot likely to take seat from Labor or Coalition - not the Greens Friday, July 30, 2010
Can Cheryl Kernot, or indeed any micro-party or independent candidate, win a Senate seat in New South Wales (NSW) this election? Based on my simulations, it does not look like it. However if Kernot can get about 5% of the vote she will have a chance to take a seat from Labor or the Coalition, meaning that we might see both an Australians Greens senator and an independent returned from NSW - an amazing result for a state which split 3 Labor 3 Coalition at the last election.
Predicting a senate result is hard. However, we now know several things about the contest on 21 August.
- We have a list of candidates.
- We know the ALP will get roughly 39% of the vote.
- We know the Greens will get roughly 12% of the vote.
- We know "roughly" means probably a margin of error of about 3.5%.
- We know that the ALP is preferencing the Greens above all other parties.
- We know (from my previous work) that randomly allocating preferences returns mostly the same result as a real election with preferences allocated by the parties.
- And finally, we have results from 2007 for a host of micro parties such as the Christian Democratic Party (CDP).
Here's a graph of the results:
So what is happening in this graph?
[more after the jump]
Greens to win two Senate seats in Tasmania and other quarterly Newspoll results Wednesday, July 21, 2010
A collapse in the Labor primary vote would crush Labor in the Senate and give the Greens a serious chance of winning two seats in Tasmania if the results of the most recent quarterly Newspoll figures were repeated at the forthcoming federal election on 21 August 2010. The Liberals would stage a dramatic turnaround, beating their 2007 result after spending most of the last two years in the doldrums.
Despite these wild swings in the number of seats won in the Senate, the effective result has not changed. The Coalition will lose its blocking power in the Senate and the Greens will gain control of the cross benches, giving them balance of power along with Labor and the Coalition.
Read more after the jump...Virtual Bridge Walk for Reconciliation Thursday, May 27, 2010
To commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Reconciliation Walk across Sydney Harbour Bridge, Australians for Native Title and Reconciliation (ANTaR) commissioned me to build a virtual bridge walk as part of their "Are We There Yet?" campaign.
My own personal idea of the Reconciliation is that white and black Australia needs to agree on what happened in the past before we can move forward. Only by "reconciling" the two different views of history we seem to have in this country (settlement vs invasion) can we chart a way forward.
Coalition out of danger zone in Western Australia Thursday, April 22, 2010
Newspoll has released its quarterly detailed breakdowns of people's voting intentions, including state-by-state breakdowns of primary votes. This allows us to extrapolate an interesting state-by-state swing to or from the major political parties, the Australian Labor Party, the Australian Liberal Party and the Australian Greens. Applying this swing to the 2007 Senate election results and running a batch of simulations using pyapollo we can see what trends are likely to be apparent in the Federal election later this year.
If an election was held today, the Senate results would possibly be Labor 19, Liberals 15, Greens 5, Independent 1. If Independent Nick Xenophon does not stand a friendly candidate and sits out the 2010 election (which is likely), the Greens are favourites to win the final seat in South Australia.
SA 2010: Coulda, Shoulda, Woulda Edition Tuesday, March 30, 2010
The final result for the South Australian (SA) 2010 Legislative Council election appears to be beyond doubt.
The split looks to be Liberals 4, Labor 4, Greens 1, Family First (FF) 1 and Dignity for Disability (D4D) 1.
My prediction was Liberals 5, Labor 4, Greens 1, Family First 1. The Liberals did slightly worse than I expected, falling 2% short of the final seat on about 6.5% of the vote at the last count (the quota is 8.33%). I think this near miss is not bad for my very first attempt at predicting a result!
The winners look to be (from the ABC):
David Ridgway (Libs), Paul Holloway (ALP), Stephen Wade (Libs), Gail Gago (ALP), Terry Stephens (Libs), Bernard Finnigan (ALP), Jing Lee (Libs), John Gazzola (ALP), Tammy Jennings (Greens), Robert Brokenshite (FF) and, excitingly, Kelly Vincent (D4D)
Rita Bouras (the fifth candidate for the Liberals) was not exactly unlucky to miss out, but I am going to say she came "12th" in the election (there are only 11 seats available).
As a follow up I have plugged the results into apollo and, now we have actual results and preference tickets, tried a few different scenarios to see what might have been. I hope you enjoy these "What If" scenarios.
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