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.

Read more after the jump...

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.

SA 2010: Overview and Predictions Thursday, March 18, 2010

Tomorrow is the 2010 South Australian election. My coverage here has been exclusively on the South Australian upper house, the Legislative Council.

Overview
Blog posts I written about #sa2010 are:

• initial overview
• what vote a minor party needs to win a seat
  
• analysis of the group voting tickets - which parties did best (and worst)
• simlulation using the GVT and newspoll and galaxy
• batch simulations teasing out the micro-party independent field 1 2

Predictions
I predict that the result from the Legislative Council election tomorrow will be: Liberals 5, Labor 4, Greens 1 and Family First 1.

However, I would not be surprised if the Liberals only get 4, with the extra seat going to the Australian Greens, Dignity for Disability or David Winderlich.

Good luck to all the candidates and their workers - your hard-work, often unrewarded, keeps this country great!

Now let's never mention SA again.

SA 2010: If all micros are created equal ...

The other day I ran a batch of simulations based on my own impressions of the South Australian Legislative Council Election. Basically I gave the micro parties and independents a slightly higher vote if I had heard of them (I live outside of SA) and a lower vote if I had not. The big winner was David Winderlich, who on 1% of the vote rode preferences from Dignity for Disability and the others to win a seat in nearly 40% of outcomes.

But what if all the smaller parties started with the same basic vote? Would Winderlich still outlast Dignity for Disability? Just who would rise to the top?

So I reset all the micros and independents to 0.5% of the vote and ran 20,000 simulations with the votes varied by normal distribution each simulation.

The big winners in this scenario are Dignity for Disability and the Greens. The losers are David Winderlich and Family First.

Read more after the jump...

Legislative Council around the traps Tuesday, March 16, 2010

 Tool for helping you vote below-the-line
Official Google Australia Blog: Be a Cluey Voter

SA 2010: Batch simulation Monday, March 15, 2010

Continuing my coverage of the South Australian 2010 Legislative Council Election, here is the batch simulation of the election.

Methodology

A batch of 20,000 simulations with a standard normal distribution applied to each party's vote (with a underlying primary vote based on a sythnesis of galaxy and newspoll). Basically, we run 20,000 simulations and each time change the vote of each party by a small random amount. This should allow us to see which parties are most likely to rise to the top. As a rule of thumb, if I, a non-South Australian, had heard of the micro party candidate I gave them 1% of the vote, else 0.1% of the vote. So David Winderlich, Save RAH, FREE Australia, Gamers4Croydon, Shooters, DLP all got 1%.


Results
The most common outcome, occurring 48.3% of the time, of the 20,000 simulations is Family First 1, Australian Greens 1, Labor 4, Liberals 5. The second most common outcome, occurring 39.5% of the time, is Family First 1, Greens 1, David Winderlich 1, Labor 4, Liberals 5. A distant outside chance, occurring in 10.2% of simulations is the Greens winning 2 seats.

Read more after the jump...

SA 2010: Greens vs Family First for final Legislative Council seat

With the group voting tickets now published for the South Australian Legislative Council election, and newspoll and galaxy providing reasonably up-to-date polling of the electorate, it is possible to run a simulation of this weekend's Legislative Council election. In fact, we can run two, one for newspoll and one for galaxy.

Results
If Newspoll is accurate, next weekend will result in the Liberals winning 5 seats, Labor 4 and the Greens 2. If Galaxy is accurate, result will be Liberals 5, Labor 4, Greens 1, Family First 1.

Methodology
Taking the declared candidates, the group voting tickets lodged with the South Australian electoral commission, and the predicted vote for each candidate provided by the latest polls, I simulate the election day by counting the votes in a manner similar to the one used on the day. Candidates with a quota 8.33% are elected to a seat. If, after electing all candidates with a quota, there are seats unfilled, we eliminate the candidate with the lowest number of votes. These votes are then distributed to their next preference. We keep eliminating candidates until somebody has quota, and eventually all the seats are filled. I don't do split tickets very well, but then this is just all idle speculation.


Newspoll