Once the polls close in the eastern states at 6pm, broadcasts begin, panellists clear their throats and voters get to see what it’s in store for the next three years

6pm: (all times are Australian eastern standard time)

Polls close at 6pm on the east coast – New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, Tasmania and the ACT – and by then 80% of electorates will have finished voting and most television broadcasts will be starting.

Not much happens during this period. If you’re planning to watch the results closely, now is the time to grab some food and sort out your evening.

The television broadcasts will mostly focus on discussions among their panellists about how the campaign has gone – a lot of the same that we’ve seen for the past eight weeks.

There may have been some exit polls released between 5pm and 6pm which may give people something to talk about, but we don’t have to wait long for some real data.

Who’s hosting coverage

ABC

Leigh Sales will take centre stage as the anchor for the ABC’s coverage for the first time, alongside the ABC’s political editor Chris Uhlmann, Barrie Cassidy, Sabra Lane, Fran Kelly, Patricia Karvelas, Marius Benson, Louise Yaxley, Greg Jennett, Annabel Crabb, Michael Rowland, Virginia Trioli and Julia Baird. Coverage begins at 5.30pm and can be watched online via ABC News 24.

The ABC’s election analyst, Antony Green, will sort through results and call seats throughout the night, and the treasurer, Scott Morrison, and Labor senator Penny Wong will also be on the panel.

On Insiders on Sunday morning, Barrie Cassidy and guests the AFR’s Laura Tingle, the Australian’s Niki Savva and the Courier Mail’s Dennis Atkins will be analysing the results.

Seven

Seven’s coverage will be anchored by Mark Riley, who will be joined on the panel by Mark Ferguson, Chris Reason, Marija Jovanovic and Jeff Kennett, Alan Jones, Mark Latham. Coverage begins at 5pm.

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Nine

Karl Stefanovic and Lisa Wilkinson will host Nine’s coverage with Laurie Oakes. Commentators include Peter Costello, Kim Beazley, Anthony Albanese, Amanda Vanstone, Arthur Sinodinos and Maxine McKew.

Sky

Sky News will be live from 5pm. When the polls close on the east coast, its political editor, David Speers, will reveal the results of the Sky News exit poll, conducted by Newspoll. Commentators include Keiran Gilbert, Paul Murray, Laura Jayes, Bruce Hawker, Peta Credlin, Michael Kroger and Guardian Australia columnist Kristina Keneally.

If the election results are all too much, you can throw the switch from one grinding interminable race to another and head to SBS for the 188km first stage of the Tour de France from Mont-Saint-Michel to Utah beach Ste-Marie-du-Mont, or on Channel Ten there’s Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol if that’s more your thing.

6.30pm

Polls close at 6.30pm AEST in South Australia and the Northern Territory, which make up just under 10% of the House of Representatives.

We’ll be getting a slow trickle of votes at 6.30 but they will be very small, unrepresentative samples, mostly from small booths in rural areas. In the next half-hour, we should see the first substantial numbers come in.

7pm

By now we should have some worthwhile numbers from some of the regional seats on the east coast.

Watch Page and Eden-Monaro on the NSW coast for the first sign of whether there is a swing to Labor. Polls have suggested substantial swings to Labor in these two seats and in both the defeated Labor MPs are returning for another shot. If Labor can’t win these seats it suggests it will struggle to get enough of a swing to win government.

It’s also worth watching the Tasmanian seats of Bass, Braddon and Lyons, all of which will be crucial. If Labor can sweep these seats it will be doing quite well.

Labor also hopes to gain the central Queensland seats of Flynn, Capricornia and Dawson. Strong Labor showings in these Liberal National party seats would suggest a strong performance in Queensland.

We’re unlikely to get a clear result in these seats by 7pm, but we should start to see a trend.

You’d also expect to see a lot of safe seats on the east coast called for by either major party. If the result was a clear thumping win for either side, you would expect the picture to become clear around now, but nobody is expecting such a result in 2016.

7.30pm

We should have substantial data flowing in from South Australia and the Northern Territory by now.

Solomon is a key Coalition marginal covering Darwin, and hasn’t had much polling attention. Labor will be hoping to pick it up.

We will be getting our first hint of the scale of the swing to the Nick Xenophon Team in South Australia. If the party is polling around 15-20% statewide it will have a chance of picking up a handful of seats such as Mayo, Barker or Grey. If the party can get closer to 30%, it may well sweep the state and win most seats. If this happens, it would be almost impossible for either side to win a majority, and you’d expect that the NXT results in South Australia would become the big story of the night.

By this point we should also have a lot more data from the east coast – perhaps as much as 30% of votes in Queensland and New South Wales. So most seats should have a clear picture, and we should be able to drill down to perhaps 10 to 20 east coast seats that are close.

It’s worth watching here for seats in the big east coast cities. Can Labor recover ground in the inner-city multicultural marginal seats of Banks and Reid, where Labor stalled at the 2015 state election? What is the swing in outer-suburban marginals such as Lindsay, Macarthur and Petrie.

If Labor is not performing strongly, keep an eye on Bruce and Chisholm, two Melbourne suburban seats where the longstanding Labor MP has retired.

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8pm

Polls have closed in Western Australia, but we won’t see substantial data from there for another hour.

You’d expect analysis to be drilling down into key east coast seats – the television broadcasts probably will be focusing on interviewing MPs who have survived close races, and newly elected candidates.

We should have enough information to get a more precise picture about the Nick Xenophon Team vote in South Australia.

9pm

Start watching the Western Australian results now – votes will be reported in the next half hour.

State polling has suggested that Labor should gain a substantial swing in Western Australia, so keep an eye out for Liberal marginals such as Cowan, Swan, Burt and Hasluck.

Senate votes will also be starting to be reported – about 4.3% of the vote had been reported at 9pm in 2013. It’s too early to make any conclusions.

9.30pm

By now you’d be expecting to be able to call all but the closest races in Western Australia.

If the result is relatively close but a hung parliament is not guaranteed, this might be the point in the night where the election is called – either a strong Labor result is confirmed with a big swing in Western Australia, or the Coalition staves off defeat thanks to a small swing in Western Australia.

Here come the Senate votes – we now will have over 10% in a number of big eastern states.

10pm

If the result is clear, expect a declaration from the networks, and in the next hour you should expect first the defeated leader and then the new prime minister to speak to their supporters.

If the result isn’t clear, expect a lot of talk of the likely makeup of hung parliament, which crossbenchers have been elected (keep an eye on Cowper, New England and Batman, as well as most of South Australia) and which key Labor-Coalition races are still in play that could tip one side over the top.

We should have enough Senate votes now to roughly predict how most seats will fall, and which minor parties are contenders. If the Turnbull government is re-elected, we can probably gain a rough sense of its numbers in a joint sitting.

11pm

By 11pm, House of Representatives counting in the eastern states should have slowed to a trickle – most booths will be in, and most of the remainder won’t be counted tonight. Western Australia is rapidly catching up on the east.

By this point it should be clear which handful of seats are left undecided, and if the election is close you should be looking at those seats to work out what is likely to happen.

We should also have a lot of Senate votes coming by now.

Midnight

Based on vote-counting in 2013, you would expect about 80% of lower house votes and about 60% of Senate votes to be counted by midnight.

We can make predictions about most Senate seats, although the last one or two in each state will likely have to wait for all votes to be counted and preferences to be distributed, which will take weeks.

Counting will continue until early morning. The Senate results in Western Australia are likely to remain unclear until about 2am.