This blog post is an update to two blog posts I wrote in 2022, looking at the rate of counting progress on election night and how the primary vote for Labor, the Coalition and the Greens shifts over the course of the night.
First up, this chart shows the proportion of the total votes cast that were counted (as House primary votes) at each minute of election night, for the eight states and territories.
If you compare this to the equivalent 2019 chart, most states show a much slower count in 2022 than 2019.
We can compare these more directly by merging the data into a single national chart for House primary vote counting progress, and comparing it to the same line for the previous four federal elections.
There is a notable slowing down of vote-counting at each election. At 8pm on election night in 2010, almost 45% of House primary votes had been counted. Only about 40% had been counted by that point in 2013, and around 30% in 2016 and 2019. Only about 21% of the vote had been counted by 8pm in 2022.
This change in counting trends means that the bulk of counting stretches out deeper into the night, rather than having a rapid count early on and then little additions later in the night.
In 2010, 77% of the vote was cast by 10pm, which was almost all of the votes counted by the end of the night. This number dropped to just over 60% by 10pm in 2019, but the final vote share counted by the end of the night ended up in a similar place, around 80-84% of the final vote totals.
In 2022, however, significantly fewer votes had been counted by the end of the night, reaching 50% by 10pm and not quite reaching three quarters of all votes counted by the time counting stopped around 2am. I think this was due to a combination of an increased number of postal votes that weren’t counted on the night, and some pre-poll booths not reporting primary votes on election night.
After initially publishing this post I have added an extra chart which I think also illustrates this point. It shows the raw number of votes added per hour – not a cumulative count.
Over 5 million primary votes were added to the count in the 7-8 hour in 2010, but it was only 2.9 million in 2022.
In contrast 2019 and 2022 recorded more votes later in the night, but it doesn’t fully compensate for that slow early start.
So far I have been entirely focused on the counting of House primary votes but there are three different kinds of votes counted on the night: House primary votes, House two-candidate-preferred counts, and Senate primary votes.
Unsurprisingly, House primary votes and then House 2CP votes make more progress with counting than Senate primary votes. But the levels of progress are interesting.
While the 2CP count is usually about 45 minutes behind the House primary count, by the end of the night it isn’t that far behind. 74% of primary votes are counted, along with almost 71% of 2CP votes.
The Senate count is substantially less progressed, with the count flattening out just short of 50%.
If there is an increase in pre-poll voting in 2025 and postal voting remains steady, I don’t see these trends changing – it is still taking longer for votes to be counted, and this means that we are likely to have a less complete picture at the end of the night.
Finally I’m not going to provide much analysis of the final three charts, showing the primary vote for Labor, the Coalition and the Greens throughout the night at the last five federal elections, but they give you a sense of how long it takes for the vote counts to resemble the final results.
The most interesting element is how Labor’s primary vote in 2022 did not follow its previous shape. Instead, Labor’s final primary vote was significantly understated until votes were reported from Western Australia, where Labor did much better than they have in the past.
