02:15

There’s some interesting, if not VERY EARLY, movements in the Tasmanian Senate vote. I will let Ben Raue explain from his post on his Tally Room blog.

Here is Ben:

There is a lot of below-the-line votes reporting for Lisa Singh and Richard Colbeck, who have the potential to be the first candidates to win seats off the back of below-the-line votes, potentially defeating their party’s preselected ticket. This data also suggests that Labor and the Greens may only get six seats, whereas the party totals suggest seven.

We are now, slowly, starting to see a few polling booths processed, so that informal votes have been correctly assessed and below-the-line votes are assigned to the individual candidate. I’ll look at Tasmania both because there are only five seats to examine, and because of the talk around major party candidates Lisa Singh and Richard Colbeck overcoming their unwinnable ticket position on the back of below-the-line votes.

I should stress that this sample is very small – we only have the divisional office pre-poll from three out of five seats, and one of the special hospital booths from each of these three seats. We’re talking about 1,000 votes out of a total of 280,000. I’ll repeat this exercise in coming days to see if it stands.

Firstly – the informal rate drops from 4.7% for the rest of the state to 1.6% in these booths.

Secondly, Lisa Singh and Richard Colbeck appear to be getting enough below-the-line votes to have a chance of overtaking their party order. Singh is currently polling 12.2% of the total Labor vote, and Colbeck is polling 11.5% of the total Liberal vote. As a comparison, in 2013 no candidate on either major party ticket polled over 5% of the party’s vote in Tasmania. It’s also the case that the vast majority of below-the-line votes usually go to the party’s lead candidate, yet Singh is polling 2.4 times the vote of the Labor lead candidate, and Colbeck is polling 1.6 times the vote of the Liberal lead candidate.

If you assume this proportion of the vote stays for the rest of the count, Singh would poll 0.54 quotas in her own right, with the rest of the Labor ticket polling just under 4 quotas. If this is the case there would be no votes left for Labor No 5 candidate John Short, and Singh would have a good chance of winning the seat, and would be the beneficiary of any Labor above-the-line preferences.

If we do the same exercise for Colbeck, he would poll 0.474 quotas, and the rest of the ticket would poll 3.65 quotas. This could possibly lead to both the fourth Liberal (Bushby) and Colbeck to win seats, possibly at the expense of either Singh or Greens second candidate Nick McKim.