Articles from The Tally Room

Bradfield headed for recount, with Boele in the lead

The two-candidate-preferred count in Bradfield has finished, with teal independent Nicolette Boele finally taking the lead right at the end, thanks to a very strong batch of postal votes and also a favourable batch of pre-poll ballots.

The AEC website says that there are 59 votes outstanding, but I have been informed by the AEC media team that these ballots can only be counted for the Senate, not the House, and so the House count has finished.

Booth map of the day – Calwell

For today’s booth map of the day I’ve gone to Calwell, the most complex seat of 2025. This booth map shows the primary vote for Labor, Liberal and the two leading independents, and swings for Labor and Liberal.

Let’s not praise the Australian electoral system too much

There’s been a lot of discussion in the last few days about the merit of Australia’s electoral system. In response to some conservative attacks on our preferential system, sometimes implicitly or explicitly suggesting a first-past-the-post system would be somehow more legitimate.

Booth map of the day – northern Tasmania

Tasmania flew under the radar in the lead up to the recent election, because of the lack of state polling in Tasmania. It was a “known unknown” to quote Donald Rumsfeld, and I do remember commenting that we didn’t know how things were going in Tasmania, but still we did not know. This did create space for some fevered commenters on this website to confidently assert that Labor was on track to be badly beaten, but now we know better.

Booth map of the day – suburban Brisbane

My last few booth maps have been focused on the non-classic races – the Greens in Melbourne, and the teals in Melbourne, Sydney and Perth. But a big part of the story was Labor routing the Coalition in traditional urban marginal seats, particularly those on the edges of cities, with the ultimate symbol being Peter Dutton’s defeat in Dickson.

The ever-complexifying House count

In 2022 I wrote a blog post where I explained the phenomenon of the AEC needing to do more distribution of preferences before declaring election results, and thus needing longer to complete this process. We now have updated information for 2025, and can see that this process has become even more complex this year. When you look at how this has changed over two decades, it is a remarkable transformation.

Booth map of the day – teal Sydney and Curtin

For today’s blog post, I thought I’d wrap up the remaining urban teal contests in Sydney and Perth.

Booth map of the day – teal Melbourne

For today’s booth map we’re staying in Melbourne but heading slightly south-east, to look at the two incumbent teal MPs in Melbourne: Zoe Daniel’s seat of Goldstein and Monique Ryan’s seat of Kooyong. Daniel was defeated in Goldstein, while Ryan narrowly held on in Kooyong.

Podcast #149: The most complex count ever?

Ben was joined by Kevin Bonham to run through the close seats and the Senate race that have dragged out, one week after the election.

Booth map of the day – inner north of Melbourne

Throughout this week, and perhaps the next, I will be posting booth maps for interesting seats, or clusters of seats. I will be doing this while also tracking the election results as seats continue to be called. But these maps generally just show the ordinary election day votes, so shouldn’t change much, outside of corrections.

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