Support the Tally Room on Patreon

I’ve been running this website now for just over nine years, and in that time I’ve put in thousands of hours of work, in particular making election guides and electoral boundary maps, more recently expanding into producing clean election results datasets free for use.

A handful of much-appreciated readers have been donating a small monthly amount for a while now, but it’s only just enough to cover the financial cost of running the web server.

I’ve explained on my Patreon page what I’d like to do with any additional donations – my goal is to have twenty regular donors giving every month to keep up my current work, but I’ve also set some stretch goals that would allow me to spend more time on the website and get more stuff done. I’m planning to do regular updates about my ongoing work to those who sign up as patrons.

My plan is to see how many patrons sign up in the month of December, and then use that to plan my work for 2018.

You can become a patron by clicking this button:

Become a Patron!

And below the fold you can read my spiel from the Patreon page.

Hi, I’m Ben Raue, and I run the Tally Room website. I’ve been running this website since 2008, covering elections in Australia.

I’ve focused on publishing useful data and background information to make it easier for my readers to understand Australian elections, alongside my own analysis and predictions. I’d like to think I’m known for being fair and rising above my own biases in my analysis.

I’ve particularly specialised in publishing thorough guides to each election, including informative maps for each electorate as well as candidate lists, past results and the history and geography of the seat. I’ve now published such a guide for every state and federal election since 2010. These guides have also been popular places to have discussions about a specific electorate in the comments sections.

I’ve also been publishing boundary maps for every Australian state and territory electoral redistribution over the last decade, as well as local government boundaries for most of the country and ward maps for Australia’s four biggest states.

More recently, I began compiling results from various state and local elections and publishing the results in an easy-to-use format, in my data repository . A lot of these results are hard to access, published as PDFs or even image files. I’ve aimed to publish them in a single spreadsheet, with matching files listing the polling places with latitudes and longitudes (often not provided by the electoral commission), and full lists of candidates.

Of course I also provide my own analysis and coverage of results, but the niche for this website has always been providing this foundational data which can help everyone do better work analysing elections.

This work is not currently sustainable. I receive a small amount of money in donations already but this has not been sufficient to be able to take time out of my regular day job to devote to this website. In the long run I won’t be able to keep up this work without financial support. In particular, it will continue to be difficult to keep up with the fickle timelines set by elections – more donors will allow me to ensure the guide to the next federal election is done well in advance, in case the election is called early.

Your support will help continue this work, and will be greatly appreciated. I’ve set out what my goals are to keep doing this work, and ideally expand the website by completing priority projects sooner and advance further projects, including historical election data and maybe even a podcast. Thanks so much in advance for your help!

Liked it? Take a second to support the Tally Room on Patreon!