Looking forward in the close seats

I have a list of sixteen seats which I think are close enough to pay further attention over the next few days as more votes flow in. In this article I want to explain what data we will be receiving which will help us project...

The day after – quick update

Firstly, apologies for the technical problems last night. I hope that readers were able to follow my commentary as part of the Guardian liveblog. In future if I'm participating in a liveblog somewhere else I'm not going to try and keep my own liveblog...

Federal election live

In addition to updating this liveblog here, you can also follow my commentary on Twitter or at the Guardian liveblog. 9:26pm - Sorry guys, I'm going to cut this short. Follow the Guardian liveblog for my coverage, I haven't got the space to do both. I...

Election eve open thread

Polls open on the east coast in fifteen hours. I thought I might open up a quick post to allow commenters to post general comments about the election. If you have predictions feel free to post them below. I have had a number of articles up...

Early voting update

The Australian Electoral Commission is publishing daily statistics on the number of postal vote applications (PVAs) received, and the number of votes cast at pre-poll centres. After six weeks of the campaign, and one week of pre-poll, we now have a sense of the...

Seat polls – how do they compare?

We've seen a surge in seat polls at this election. By my count I've found at least 50 polls which have been publicly released since the beginning of April. This is suggests we are on track for a big increase since 2013. You can download my list...

Nominations announced – final update

Nominations were declared at midday yesterday, and I've just finished updating the candidate lists for each seat and the eight Senate races. I wrote speculatively about the number of candidate nominations on Thursday in the Guardian. At the time of writing, 772 House of Representatives...

Candidate numbers update

I've written a piece for the Guardian going through the numbers of candidates running at this point. Since I wrote that piece yesterday afternoon, I've identified nineteen more candidates: The Nationals candidate for Hunter The Labor candidate for Moore And seventeen (!) Liberal Democrats lower house...

Candidate update

I've gotten a number of queries from people asking why their particular favoured candidate on the website. I thought I would just explain my current process, and invite readers to help me complete my dataset. I've learnt from past campaigns that candidates will gradually trickle...

NSW council amalgamations – the never-ending election

Yesterday I posted a quick summary of the NSW government's council amalgamation announcement. Today I wanted to run through the partisan impact of the councils being created, and the impacts on the next NSW council elections. In December, I assessed the proposed council amalgamations by calculating...