ACT Senate Count explained

savoman said :

Robertson said :

chewy14 said :

So in the end all the gnashing of teeth and claims that the Greens were close to winning the seat on BTL preferences were completely wrong. The Liberals once again claimed the seat fairly easily in the end and the Greens would need a couple of % point swing to claim this seat.

“Fairly easily”?

Not with no quota achieved before redistributions it wasn’t. Worst Lib result ever.

Was bad for all 3 , greens. libs and labor… really if the swing away from labor had have been much bigger they would have been in the same possie as the libs.

Yes but that was never going to happen as most of the not lab/lib/grn preferences flowed Labor before libs. I doubt we will ever see one of the senate seats not going to labor, even with Gillard as leader we’d have had a labor senator.
Antony Green said in many articles, it would take a massive effort to unseat the liberal senator and it nearly happened, but it was mostly due to labor voters voting below the line and trying to get preferences to other parties, such that ultimately they would knock of the libs. If this happened 1 election ago, the greens would have had a higher first preference and probably would have happened, but dissatisfaction with the greens meant it was going to be very difficult yet possible.

Deref said :

“Our below-the-line voting rate was 20%, the highest of any state or territory”

Senate candidates by state/territory:
NT 24
ACT 27
TAS 54
WA 62
SA 73
QLD 82
VIC 97
NSW 110

Hardly surprising that we had highest below the line votes when every single state had at least double the amount of candidates we did. If there were 80+ senate candidates, I certainly wouldn’t have voted below the line.

I said it before the election and I’ll say it again, my vote was wasted even though I did it right. It’s almost like the Melbourne cup, I just can’t pick a winner.

Robertson said :

chewy14 said :

So in the end all the gnashing of teeth and claims that the Greens were close to winning the seat on BTL preferences were completely wrong. The Liberals once again claimed the seat fairly easily in the end and the Greens would need a couple of % point swing to claim this seat.

“Fairly easily”?

Not with no quota achieved before redistributions it wasn’t. Worst Lib result ever.

So would you think that it was also a horrible result for Labor and the Greens seeing as their first preference votes also diminished significantly?

Or is it simply the fact that the amount of parties involved this time guaranteed a dilution of all the major party’s votes? Claims like ‘worst lib result’ are really meaningless without the context of how our senate voting system works. You could just as easily say that they got 4000 more votes without the context of population increases.

Fact is, once again the Greens will need to do a fair bit more to win that second seat (or Lundy’s).

Robertson said :

chewy14 said :

So in the end all the gnashing of teeth and claims that the Greens were close to winning the seat on BTL preferences were completely wrong. The Liberals once again claimed the seat fairly easily in the end and the Greens would need a couple of % point swing to claim this seat.

“Fairly easily”?

Not with no quota achieved before redistributions it wasn’t. Worst Lib result ever.

Was bad for all 3 , greens. libs and labor… really if the swing away from labor had have been much bigger they would have been in the same possie as the libs.

chewy14 said :

So in the end all the gnashing of teeth and claims that the Greens were close to winning the seat on BTL preferences were completely wrong. The Liberals once again claimed the seat fairly easily in the end and the Greens would need a couple of % point swing to claim this seat.

“Fairly easily”?

Not with no quota achieved before redistributions it wasn’t. Worst Lib result ever.

caf said :

savoman said :

Yes A considerable number of votes leaked from Nash…. at 643 votes…massive.

Considering that the number of first preference votes for Nash was 1644, that means at least 40% of those voters didn’t put Zed next. You’re right though, I should have said “a considerable proportion” rather than number.

I suppose it’s all small bikkies in the end. If you look at the proportions involved in the Liberal vote, 7403 people voted below the line and put the Libs first; that’s 9% of all their first preference votes. Of those, 5751 voted for Zed (7%), and 1652 for Nash (2%). So in the end, 2% of Liberal voters protested against Zed, but 2/3 of those went on to preference him over other parties. Only 0.8% of Liberal voters indicated that they’d rather have someone from a different party than Zed.

chewy14 said :

So in the end all the gnashing of teeth and claims that the Greens were close to winning the seat on BTL preferences were completely wrong. The Liberals once again claimed the seat fairly easily in the end and the Greens would need a couple of % point swing to claim this seat.

I suppose it depends on what you mean by “fairly easily”, but the Liberals did it harder this time than they have in the past – I believe the only other time that they didn’t reach a quota on Liberal votes alone was when One Nation ran in 1998.

savoman said :

Yes A considerable number of votes leaked from Nash…. at 643 votes…massive.

Considering that the number of first preference votes for Nash was 1644, that means at least 40% of those voters didn’t put Zed next. You’re right though, I should have said “a considerable proportion” rather than number.

Looks like my vote exhausted, just as I intended. Glad I didn’t end up voting for anyone.