Seat in focus: Indi

By
Ben Raue
-
9

Indi has been the seat that has been the most interesting seat during the first week of counting. Cathy McGowan has led for most of the week, but was on track to fall behind before an additional 1003 votes that had not been correctly entered were found, and expanded her lead.

Click here to read my pre-election profile of Indi.

Cathy McGowan’s margin is now 837 votes. Most of the postal votes have now been counted, and these substantially helped Mirabella. Only small batches of absentee and prepoll votes have been counted. At the moment, Mirabella has a 56.5% lead in prepoll votes and McGowan has a 54.52% lead in absentee votes. There is, however, a lot more prepoll votes to come in, which should mean that Mirabella will narrow the gap further as they are counted.

Type of vote IND % LIB % To be counted
Absent 54.52 45.48 1,158
Provisional – – 377
Pre-Poll 43.49 56.51 3,535
Postal 42.47 57.53 1,012

I estimate that if the current trends continue in the remaining votes in the three major categories (and the 377 provisional votes split evenly), then Sophie Mirabella will gain an additional 507 votes, narrowing the gap to 330 votes.

At this point, it’s a bit too close to comfortably say McGowan will win. Of course, it’s possible McGowan will pick up ground in the next batch of prepoll votes. Less than 700 of these prepoll votes have been counted, which is too little to be sure that they are representative of the entire sample. It’s also possible Mirabella will pick up ground on both absentee and prepoll votes and win, but she would need to do a lot better.

Now let’s turn our attention to the geographical breakdown of results. Again, I have used the same geographic divisions as I did in my pre-election profile. The biggest city in the electorate, Wodonga, has its own subdivision, as does the rural council area of Indigo immediately south of Wodonga. The next biggest city, Wangaratta, makes up 4465 out of the 11,190 votes in the ‘west’ subdivision.

Voter Group GRN % ALP % IND % LIB % IND 2PP Total votes % of ordinary votes
West 2.34 9.58 36.18 43.83 51.50 11,190 24.02
Wodonga 2.79 11.52 35.70 37.95 55.81 10,534 22.61
South 5.58 18.02 18.30 49.21 45.26 9,497 20.39
East 4.05 8.31 33.34 46.89 48.99 7,867 16.89
Indigo 3.70 7.71 44.57 37.23 59.07 7,494 16.09
Other votes 2.79 11.86 29.83 46.58 48.61 36,907

Cathy McGowan won majorities in the west, Wodonga and Indigo. Sophie Mirabella won majorities in the south and east, as well as a majority of other votes.

The ‘other votes’ category doesn’t just include the categories discussed above. Since 2010, prepoll votes cast at regular prepoll centres within the electorate are counted on election night as ordinary votes, and are counted in the list of booths. These prepoll votes varied between booths. Over 16,000 votes were cast at the Wangaratta and Wodonga prepoll centres, and McGowan won slim majorities at both of those booths. Overall, McGowan won a majority in all of the ‘other votes’ before you include the 7720 postal votes counted so far – these went to Mirabella so strongly that she wins that category.

McGowan did particularly well in the big cities of Wangaratta and Wodonga. While McGowan won a slim 51.5% majority in the west of the electorate, that actually included a 56.7% majority in the four Wangaratta booths and only 48.1% in the other 26 booths in the area.

After the fold are maps of the results across the electorate, including special maps for Wodonga and Wangaratta.

Two-candidate-preferred votes in Indi at the 2013 federal election.
Two-candidate-preferred votes in Indi at the 2013 federal election.
Two-candidate-preferred votes in Wodonga at the 2013 federal election.
Two-candidate-preferred votes in Wodonga at the 2013 federal election.
Two-candidate-preferred votes in Wangaratta at the 2013 federal election.
Two-candidate-preferred votes in Wangaratta at the 2013 federal election.
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9 COMMENTS

  2. If Cathy McGowan wins, it’ll be one of the best things to have happened – I speak not so much from the point of view of seeing a polarising MP defeated, but from a different perspective.
    I’ve been really angry at reading and hearing of various commentators giving it big-time to Independents since Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor decided to support the previous Labor government, in an act of “betraying” their conservative electorates. Since then, those many commentators and the Coalition parties have conducted jihad after jihad against virtually every Independent MP across the country, painting a vote for Independents as a vote for Labor, which was blatantly untrue. I watched Craig Ingram, Peter Draper, Dawn Fardell, Peter Besseling, Chris Foley, and Rob Messenger all fall victim to this dishonesty – not one of those Independent MPs deserved to cop what they copped over something that they had nothing to do with. This would’ve swept away Oakeshott if he’d chosen to run again in Lyne, but I still think that Windsor would’ve beaten Barnaby Joyce in New England if he’d chosen to run again.
    I don’t know if these dirty tricks were employed against McGowan, but if they were, I’d be even happier to see her win if indeed she does.

  5. This morning I said

    I estimate that if the current trends continue in the remaining votes in the three major categories (and the 377 provisional votes split evenly), then Sophie Mirabella will gain an additional 507 votes, narrowing the gap to 330 votes.

    The change in votes today is almost entirely explained by those votes – it’s mostly an increase in the prepoll vote and postal vote following the same proportions, if slightly more favourable to Mirabella. Still don’t think she’ll win.

  7. I have McGowan projected to only lose six more votes. Very few leftover votes. Mirabella would need at least 65% of leftover votes, more like 72% if most of the provisional votes are thrown out.

  8. Warren Grzic is correct about the dishonest electioneering of Liberals. “A Vote for an independent is a vote for Labor” is both dishonest and below the belt. In 2010 a vote for Liberals was a vote for the Greens. A vote for Campbell Newman was a vote for a failure to honour election promise to repeal civil unions legislation.

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