The Tally Room

It's a delightful irony that, like "Honest John" before him, Lawrence Springborg's LNP have taken to calling their leader "The Borg" with no apparent sense of irony or awareness of the meaning of the nickname. Springborg is heading into his third election as leader...

Sky News is now reporting that Anna Bligh will go to Government House in Brisbane today to call an early election, presumably on March 28. More to come. Update: So I was wrong, it was March 21. Unfortunately the news broke about five minutes after...

I just finished David Day's third book in what is rapidly becoming a series of biographies of Australia's Labor Prime Ministers: Andrew Fisher: Prime Minister of Australia. This follows on the back of his John Curtin: A Life and Chifley. Andrew Fisher's story is one...

With the possible imminent calling of a state election in Queensland, I've moved ahead with plans for election night coverage, using my Google Earth map of the new Queensland boundaries, which you can check out here. There's still some kinks to be worked out....

Via Pollbludger, reports out of Western Australia suggest that by-elections may be imminent in the seats of two of the former Labor government's biggest figures: former Premier Alan Carpenter in Willagee and former Attorney-General Jim McGinty in the neighbouring seat of Fremantle. Pollbludger quotes...

With the continuing speculation of an impending Queensland election, Antony Green has launched the ABC elections guide to the coming election. All the usual features, profiles of electorates, indexes by candidate, electorate name and margin, and my famous Election Calculator.

There are a handful of seats in the House of Representatives where the Greens are within spitting distance of winning the seat. In nearly all of them, however, the true margin is hidden by the AEC's methods of measuring marginality. Margins are calculated by...

I've come across an interesting election animation, showing the electoral map of every UK election since the Reform Act of 1832, showing the geographical distribution of Conservative, Labour and Liberal/Liberal Democrat seats since that time as a cartogram. You can clearly see the shift over...

Tim Andrews has written a post projecting what he thinks would happen to the Senate at a double dissolution or half senate election, concluding that either scenario would see the Greens control the balance of power, with Labor + Greens giving a majority, and...

A few days ago the website RealClearWorld came out with a list of the five elections it considers the most significant of 2009. They are: Israel Iran Germany Japan Afghanistan Well worth a read.