Friday night counting update

As it stands, there are still a bunch of seats left outstanding.

Seven seats are on margins of less than 50.6%, and I’ll run through a couple of key races here:

Apart from these seven seats, the Coalition holds 87 seats, the ALP holds 53 seats, and there are three crossbench seats (Bandt, Katter, Wilkie).

• Barton – The Liberal lead has widened to 895 votes in Barton. Labor was leading by 42 on Tuesday. Most absentee and postal votes have been counted, which both favour Liberal, but no prepoll votes. It’s likely the Liberals will win.
• Capricornia – The LNP has turned a 152-vote deficit into an 872-vote lead since Tuesday. Another roughly 2000 postal votes (favouring LNP strongly) and 2000 absentees (favouring ALP narrowly) as well as all of the prepoll votes are yet to come in. LNP likely to win.
• Eden-Monaro – Most declaration votes, apart from 1000 provisional votes, 500 absentee, 450 postal and 1400 prepoll votes, have been counted. The Liberal Party’s lead has widened from 569 votes on Tuesday to 864, and Labor MP Mike Kelly conceded today. Liberal to win.
• Fairfax – Since Tuesday, Clive Palmer’s lead has narrowed from 1,391 votes to 718. Approximately 8000 out of 15,000 declaration votes remain uncounted, and the largest share of these are prepoll votes from outside of the area, along with 2300-2400 each of absentee and postal votes. Clive Palmer performed very strongly (57.6%) in the absentee votes counted so far, and very poorly (62.3%) in the postal votes. While Palmer is narrowly trailing in prepoll votes counted so far, this gap won’t be enough and he should be elected.
• Indi – The seat everyone has been watching: Cathy McGowan currently leads by 895 votes. McGowan is trailing badly in postal votes (57.61% for Mirabella) and leading strongly in absentee votes (55.27%). There are 1000 postal votes and 1600 absentee votes to be counted, but the bulk of the remaining votes are over 4000 prepoll votes and 1000 provisional votes to come. If you assume the remaining postals and absentee break the same way, Mirabella would need between 58% and 59% of the other votes to win. Very likely McGowan will win.
• McEwen – Like in 2007 (and despite a very favourable pro-Labor redistribution), McEwen is the closest seat. Liberal candidate Donna Petrovich leads by 153 votes, smaller than the 331-vote lead at the end of Tuesday. There are a lot more absentee votes than postals yet to be counted (4300 vs 1400), and Labor did better in absentees than the Liberals did in postals. However there are almost 5000 prepolls yet to be counted. The ALP should be able to regain the lead on absentee votes, but the race will be decided by the prepolls. In 2010, the ALP polled 1.3% worse on prepolls than in ordinary votes – which would give the seat to the Liberals. This seat is definitely too close to call.
• Parramatta – The only close seat where Labor leads, with Julie Owens ahead by 482 votes. Most postal votes have been counted, which heavily favoured Liberal candidate Martin Zaiter. The ALP is leading in prepoll votes (1491 to be counted) and narrowly leads amongst absentee votes, which are the largest portion of the outstanding votes. If the remaining votes break the same way, the race will stay about as close as it is now. Too close to call.

This adds up to 90 Coalition, 53 Labor, 5 crossbench and two seats (McEwen and Parramatta) genuinely so close you can’t pick someone as a favourite.

I have already posted seat profiles, with updated maps and vote breakdowns for McEwen, Barton and Capricornia, and Parramatta will be going up tomorrow. I plan to also post profiles of Indi, Fairfax and Eden-Monaro over the course of this week before wrapping up the post-election coverage.

If there’s another particularly interesting seat you’d like to see given the same coverage please let me know.

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