Queensland election dataset – pre-poll voting keeps growing

I’ve just finished pulling together all of the data from the recent Queensland state election and have added it to my data repository.

This dataset includes:

• List of candidates
• List of electorates, with data on turnout and formality
• List of polling places, including full address and latitude/longitude
• Primary vote by polling place
• Primary vote by electorate
• Two-candidate-preferred by electorate

The only thing I couldn’t track down was the two-candidate-preferred vote by polling place. The ECQ has previously not made this data available, although they have now published this data by PDF for the last three elections. I plan to turn those PDFs for 2009 and 2012 into accessible spreadsheets at some point, and I’ll revisit this dataset to add the 2PP figures if the ECQ eventually publish them (if you find them on some dark corner of the ECQ website, please let me know).

I now have this data published for two successive Queensland state elections. The data includes a field which categorises each polling place according to vote type. You can use this to count up how many votes were cast as ordinary votes, pre-poll votes or as other votes.

There’s been a long-term trend of more people choosing to vote early. I previously wrote about this in the context of NSW state elections, after pre-poll made up more than 14% of votes at the 2015 state election. I haven’t found any old posts about this, but the same trend is clear in federal elections – well over 1 million Australians voted early in 2016.

This data can show you that over 26% of votes at the 2017 Queensland state election were cast as pre-poll votes, up from 19.6% in 2015.

I’d love to also add in the same figures for the 2009 and 2012 elections, but first I’ll need to add these datasets to the data repository. You could help expedite this work by donating to this website.

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