Earlier today the “button” was pushed in the NSW upper house preference distribution. The full preference distribution was published a short time ago and I wanted to quickly run through how the final rounds of the count went.
The Coalition led Animal Justice by 0.069 quotas based on primary votes, after subtracting six full quotas for the first six Coalition members. That’s 14,526 votes to be exact.
At the end of the count, the seventh Coalition candidate, Liberal Rachel Merton defeated the AJP’s Alison Waters by 10,628 votes, or 0.051 quotas. So Animal Justice managed to close about a quarter of the gap they needed to close.
This chart below shows the votes for the last ten candidates over the last seven rounds. The change between the first and second count on the chart is the distribution of the small Greens surplus when Amanda Cohn won the seventeenth seat.
The chart shows the three candidates who clearly won seats 18-20 with less than a quota, five other candidates whose preferences were distributed, and the final two contenders for the last seat.
By the start of this chart, that original 0.069 quota gap had narrowed to 0.057. Greens preferences did help the AJP, but not by much. Bosi's preferences had no impact - more of his preferences flowed to all three of the other winning candidates still in the count than to either the Liberal or AJP candidate.
Sustainable Australia preferences also helped the AJP, narrowing the gap to 0.043.
Intriguingly, right-wing independent Lyle Shelton's preferences were the most helpful preference batch for the AJP. Only 0.015 quotas flowed to the Coalition, while 0.035 flowed to the AJP. This narrowed the gap to 0.023 quotas.
Shelton was first on the ballot, with no party name to give a hint to his political flavour, unless you happened to know Shelton's name and looked to find it below the line. The AJP were group C, and the next group to have an above-the-line box. So if someone just cast a donkey vote, their first preference would go to Shelton and their second to the AJP.
Preferences from Elizabeth Farrelly had little impact. About two thirds of her preferences exhausted, and the AJP only gained a 0.004 quota advantage on the remainder.
This left the Animal Justice Party just 0.019 quotas behind the Liberal Party, but the last candidate to fall was One Nation's Tania Mihailuk, and her preferences overwhelmingly favoured the Liberal, wiping out most of the AJP gains, and locking in the narrow win.
Both the Liberal and AJP candidates gained more preferences than the other three winning candidates, which fits with my theory that the AJP would have more trouble chasing down a Coalition candidate than a minor right-wing candidate who would gain weaker preference flows. This is also what happened in 2019, when the Nationals candidate (who did not gain a full quota but was easily elected) gained much stronger preference flows than the CDP or LDP candidates.
This is the first election since 2007 where the 21 candidates elected were the 21 candidates leading on the primary vote, after three elections where a centre-left minor party candidate managed to overtake a more right wing rival on preferences.
This result was more decisive than at either of the last two elections. The margin of victory for One Nation over the Christian Democratic Party in 2019 and of the AJP over No Land Tax in 2015 were both by about 5,000 votes, while today's result was over 10,000 votes.
One more historical fact of interest: the number of votes that exhausted in the count was significantly down, to just 5.9% of all formal votes, down from 8.6% in 2019, and around 8% at the 2011 and 2015 elections. It's not clear to me how much this is due to increased preference markings by voters, or just the fact that parties polled closer to full quotas this year. We'll have to wait and see.
That's it for now. I'll be back in a few days with some analysis of the upper house vote by district, and will then return down the track when the full preference data is available to do some more analysis.
The rule of thumb that you need at least half a quota of primaries still seems to hold.
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