The Tally Room

From media reports, it appears that Julia Gillard is set to be comfortably elected as Labor leader and Prime Minister tomorrow morning. The question then becomes: what does she do about the impending election? She will surely be planning some changes of key policies, possibly...

I've now created a few booth maps showing the primary vote results for the Greens and the two-party preferred figures for the Liberals (who won every single booth), as well as maps showing the swings in each booth. With regard to swing figures, I have...

I thought I'd jot down some thoughts on the results in today's by-elections, primarily in Penrith and to a lesser extent in Hawkesbury. Make no mistake, this was a massive result for the Liberal Party and a colossal disaster for the ALP. It's always possible...

8:40 - The two largest swings in by-elections in NSW were 23% in Ryde and 21.8% in Cabramatta, both in 2008 after Morris Iemma's resignation. 8:29 - The Greens apparently got 23% in Hawkesbury Council's by-election, up from 10% in 2008. The Liberals have won...

You can follow today's Twitter debate between NSW Premier Kristina Keneally, Leader of the Opposition Barry O'Farrell and Greens MP Lee Rhiannon right here at the Tally Room.

The entirely forgotten former Labor senator John Black has published a very strange and stupid piece of electoral analysis in yesterday's Australian, basically arguing that Greens voters are richer than Liberals, therefore they won't support the mining tax because it will hurt their share...

The Netherlands is going to the polls on Wednesday to elect a new Parliament after the sitting government recently fell after failing to reach agreement about the Netherlands' continued involvement in Afghanistan. I haven't been following this campaign closely, but a friend of mine has...

I've recently discovered that you can view Google Earth maps in the Google Earth app on the iPhone. The attached image was taken this morning on my iPhone, showing an electoral map of central Sydney, with the blue dot showing my GPS location (I...

We've seen today two very different elections on opposite sides of the world where new parties have emerged from nowhere to poll highly in a massive protest vote against the political system, in very different ways. In Colombia, voters went to the polls in their...

Ever since the ALP lost the 2002 Cunningham by-election to the Greens with a large protest vote, they have finessed the art of expectations management through the leaking of supposed internal party polling data. The latest example came yesterday when the Sun-Herald ran a...