The AEC published a fact sheet today with their estimates of margins for each electorate changed by the recently-completed federal redistributions.
There are a few pretty big differences between their estimates and my own, and I wanted to explain what I think is going on. The AEC were able to provide me with some of those estimates in advance to try and understand what is going on.
Firstly, I don’t have any particular insights into how the AEC transfers parcels of votes from one seat to another. I’ll explain at the end a bit about how I do this, and part of the process that I think I need to change that may have affected a couple of margins, but for most of this post I’m just exploring how you combine those votes once they’ve been transferred.
Firstly this shouldn’t be seen as any kind of criticism of the AEC. They are in a very different position to myself and as a government agency sometimes they will feel constrained to not make political judgements. They are also using quite sophisticated but old software to do their calculations and can’t just make tweaks on the go, while it’s easier for me to fiddle with my redistribution code. Although having said that, there is one big change I want to make and I haven’t found time to do it yet, so all of us have that issue sometimes.
Dilemmas with redistribution estimates mostly take place when an electorate takes in new areas. In the case of Curtin, for example, that seat has only lost territory, so there is no issue with deciding how to deal with mismatched 2CPs.
I see four different categories of seats.
Firstly, there are the classic seats. Generally these are simple enough. Two-party-preferred votes are calculated everywhere. The differences here seem to be quite small or sometimes there are no differences at all.
To be honest I am happy for there to be small differences as it shows that all of us (myself, Antony, William, the AEC) are doing our own work and should increase confidence in the overall analysis. They may also be explained by differences in how we treat postal votes and other votes without a specific geographic location, since that is the most complicated.
Secondly, there are non-classic seats where the 2CPs don’t match. Usually this is where a non-classic seat has taken in parts of neighbouring classic seats, but it can also include where two different non-classic 2CP combinations have been combined.
There are eight cases of this issue: Fowler, Goldstein, Grayndler, Kooyong, Melbourne, Nicholls, Wannon and Wentworth.
For my own methodology, I have calculated the difference between the 2CP and 2PP in the part of the seat which is comparable, and then applied that to the 2PP in the non-comparable bit. Understandably the AEC has not done this.
Unfortunately their method is a bit nonsensical. To take Wentworth as an example, Allegra Spender’s seat has added parts of the seats of Sydney and Kingsford Smith. Both of these areas are strongly left-leaning with strong Labor 2PP majorities. So there is no doubt that her margin relatively to the Liberal Party should go up from the actual 2022 margin of 4.2%. But the AEC’s calculations include the Liberal 2PP for the new area while ignoring the Labor 2PP in those areas, and thus make the margin much closer.
There are also three neighbouring seats on the north shore where every part of the new electorate had a 2CP between a Liberal and a teal independent in 2022. The AEC has decided that it is not their place to judge if these independents should be treated as interchangeable, and thus their margin calculations for Warringah, for example, don’t credit Zali Steggall with Kylea Tink’s votes. But for myself, and presumably other analysts working for media organisations, it’s an easy decision. You just add Steggall, Scamps, Tink and Boele 2CP votes together, as if they were a party.
Finally, there are three seats where the entire seat had a Labor vs Greens 2CP: Wills, Cooper and Sydney. It appears that the AEC’s system was not designed to be able to combine these 2CPs. I don’t fully understand what the system is doing instead, but in the case of Wills, for example, they have the Labor margin as much greater than my estimate. Wills has added a lot of very strong Greens areas from Melbourne that should be cutting the margin. The AEC is looking at fixing this bug but it won’t be done before the next election.
So for the avoidance of doubt I think there may be problems with the AEC’s margins for the following non-classic divisions: Bradfield, Cooper, Fowler, Goldstein, Grayndler, Kooyong, Mackellar, Melbourne, Nicholls, Sydney, Wannon, Warringah, Wills, Wentworth. In some cases the changes are quite minor but in others there are obvious problems. In particular Grayndler, Wentworth and Wills stand out.
Finally, I should mention an issue I’ve had with my methodology which I think has affected my Wentworth margin.
Right now my federal redistribution process evenly distributes each portion of votes across the area where those voters came from. This works great for election day votes but for categories like postal votes, where the whole electorate has a single undifferentiated bucket of votes, it means that I am not taking into account geographic differences across a seat. For example, if the most pro-Labor part of a seat is redistributed, ideally I would be moving a portion of postal votes that is also skewed towards the ALP. That is how I do it for state and local redistributions, but not currently for federal redistributions.
Until now I haven’t noticed big problems caused by this issue, but I think it may have led me to overstate Allegra Spender’s margin in Wentworth. The actual margin in 2022 was 4.2%. Antony Green has estimated it at 6.8%, while my estimate is 9.0%.
There is no doubt that Spender should be stronger on the new boundaries, but I think my margin is stronger because I have taken in an unskewed share of postal votes from the seat of Sydney, which includes extremely left-wing areas like Newtown and Glebe. While the area moved into Wentworth around Potts Point, Darlinghurst and Woolloomooloo do lean to the left, they don’t lean as far as the areas further west.
I will be trying to find time to modify my redistribution code before the election, but I just wanted to flag this.
Elsewhere, Antony Green has also explained why the AEC margins don’t match his figures (including a table comparing his figures to the AEC, myself and William Bowe).
I can understand support between the teal independents may not always translate equally between areas transferred during redistributions, but the assumption of treating them equally is the best way of measuring past support to produce meaningful future swings. Otherwise, the reported swing on election day will be misleading.
Seems the aec don’t fully understand maybe they should look at a Antony green’s blog
The AEC people absolutely understand what is going on.
Agree Ben, I think the AEC may be trying to be neutral in that they assign zero votes for the independent candidate/s in areas transferred from other districts. However, this is not a reasonable assumption because the independent candidate would still have received some votes had they contested the other seat. Perhaps an alternative is to transfer a proportion of the old independent’s vote rather than 100% (say 75% instead), as a better model.
They are aware of the limits of their approach, but they don’t see any alternative.
In the case of seats where different ALP vs GRN 2CPs have been combined – Wills, Cooper and Sydney – it is a straight-up bug in their code which they can’t fix without causing unforeseen problems in the time they have before the election.
I don’t think the AEC should be calculating the political impacts of their own redistributions.
Understandably the AEC is very cautious in its assessments regarding non-classic seats that involve suppositions, and for this reason we rely on proven commentators.
There are holes all over this. I had done a longer post which I accidentally just deleted and I’m not rewriting it.
Let’s just say, when a body of authority places disclaimers and “Stop” and “Consider” signposts in their own document about their own process (page 4), then the approach isn’t the right one. Talk about making a rod for your own back.
Why would the Aec put out such a document if they knew it was possibly wrong. Surely further discussions were needed. Or say they do not have the capacity to determine effect of the redistribution in non classic seats?
Jeremy,
I question your view that:
“Understandably the AEC is very cautious in its assessments regarding non-classic seats that involve suppositions”.
In 2022, the AEC decided on very flimsy evidence, that the notional preference count on election night would be LIB vs IND, even though ALP made the 2CP the election before quite easily, with a 25% PV. They didn’t do it in Bradfield. Whilst they were “right” in North Sydney and “wrong” in Bradfield, I don’t think the AEC should be deciding this on a hunch, even on seat polls. They should base it on the previous election results, so they can say they based on on facts, not supposition.
“But for myself, and presumably other analysts working for media organisations, it’s an easy decision. You just add Steggall, Scamps, Tink and Boele 2CP votes together, as if they were a party”
Says it all about the so called Independent Teals, doesn’t it?
@High Street:
The booth count always commences with the 2CP parties from the previous election, as results are reported from the ROs the DRO may change that.
This happened in Griffith in 2022 when it became clear early on the the Greens were way ahead of the ALP on primary votes.
Calling Griffith as an LNP/Greens contest was a bigger call than North Sydney, no one was expecting Labor to show up in the 2CP there in ’22.
High Street, it’s not a judgement about their independent status, but they are clearly compatible.
@Gympie, actually sometimes they do a different expected 2CP from what it was at the previous election. That happened quite a bit in 2022.
@Gympie.
I contend you are incorrect on both counts.
The initial direction from AEC was in North Sydney was to do an notional preference count between LIB and IND. I know this – I was scruitneering at one of the booths. In Bradfield they directed LIB vs ALP but then withdrew the preference count feed when it became clear it was unlikely to be the correct pair.
Secondly, the AFR and other media were saying that Labor was half a chance in North Sydney in 2022. The ABC coverage went to North Sydney results early on, to see who was likely to come 2nd. It is not correct to say “no one was expecting Labor to show up in the 2CP there in ’22”.
@Ben Raue
I didn’t mean that to be a shot at you, I think what you have done is quite sensible. I was just making the observation that the Teals are a long way from traditional Independent’s that have separate identities.
They seem to want both all the advantages of being Independents but the benefits of working together, but then when they miss out on the advantages pf being a party (which comes with obligations) they scream that they are being targeted.
So goes the sore loser line of the Liberal Party. Reckon you could run me through what those obligations are exactly?
“But the AEC’s calculations include the Liberal 2PP for the new area while ignoring the Labor 2PP in those areas, and thus make the margin much closer.”
Does this mean they add together the Liberal TCP from the areas being retained to the TPP from areas being gained, whereas the independents get the former and nothing else? If so, I’m curious as to how I ended up with a worse result for Monique Ryan than the AEC.
William,
I believe that is how it works. They weren’t able to confirm but I also put it to them and they didn’t contradict it. When I took my raw transferred vote data and then applied that formula it made sense. I can’t see how else you could take those changes and produce a smaller Spender majority.
And yes, good point, it doesn’t explain Kooyong.
Thanks Ben. When I apply the AEC method as described to my Wentworth numbers, I do get a result very similar to theirs.
I feel that it is not too big a deal.
After all, when I first started following elections in the 1990s, Australia’s two leading election analysts – and possibly the only ones of note at the time – were Malcolm Mackerras and Antony Green. They had different ways of calculating margins after redistributions. You could look at their pendulums in newspapers, and you often saw different margins for different seats, especially after redistributions. Of course, we now have more election analysts perhaps showing different margins for seats. And to be fair, when Malcolm and Antony were the big ones in the election analysis business, there were arguably not as many instances of seats having a two-candidate preferred margin, because of someone else beating either Labor or the Coalition in the end. Nonetheless, different analysts have different ways of calculating margins, and I feel that it is a good thing.
@William Bowe
love your work and I am a donor, but your shot at me is way off. Its actually the view of a Labor party campaign, not a “sore loser line of the Liberal Party”. If there are no obligations on Political Parties, why do I have to fill in fundraising and expenditure disclosures every 6 months? Whilst the obligations might not be onerous at the federal level, they certainly are at state level from the electoral funding Acts.
The broader point still stands. As Ben has said during 2024, political parties serve a community purpose, but have the disadvantage of being “partisan” – once you support one you are seen as “taking sides”. Teal IND’s want to be seen to be above politics, by not being party, but when they miss out of the benefits they think they should have, it someone’s else fault.
Aec hasn’t learned how to cope with the changed environment in the past most people voted for Labor and anti Labor.
Now the vote is Fragmented rarely will a party get 50% of the vote. So more and more the 2pp will not be the 2cp. Maybe the way to go is collect more stat’s and allow for contests of all possible candidates against each other even say onp against the socialist alliance similar to nsw state elections
Even in 1949 alp plus lcp got 95% of the vote
“If there are no obligations on Political Parties, why do I have to fill in fundraising and expenditure disclosures every 6 months?”
For the same reasons that third parties like Climate 200 and all the teal independent MPs have to do exactly the same thing.