Queensland election 2015: Voters expect LNP to retain government, ABC Vote Compass survey suggests

Updated

Queensland's voters expect the LNP will retain power in the state election today, the results of the ABC's Vote Compass survey suggest.

However, the ALP stands to regain plenty of lost ground, with respondents believing Labor will win 35 seats out of 89.

If survey respondents are right, Labor's representation in the Parliament could be boosted by up to 400 per cent because Labor currently holds just nine seats.

The results are not an indication of who survey respondents intend to vote for; rather they reflect respondents' beliefs about who will win their local seat.

How likely do you think it is for each of the parties to win in your electorate? Average of all respondents Average of all respondents Potential seats won, based on responses LNP Labor KAP

In last year's Victorian election, Vote Compass respondents' expectations about who would win were correct in all but two seats.

Different electorates have various levels of confidence in their expectation, and 12 of the 25 electorates with the lowest levels of confidence were expected to be Labor wins.

In the key seat of Ashgrove, Vote Compass respondents say Campbell Newman will win, although it is a close call; survey respondents were not confident they were right.

"Voters think that Campbell Newman will win, but it's by a particularly low confidence measure," Vote Compass creator Cliff van der Linden said.

"It's a very tight race, basically."

ABC election analyst Antony Green said he expected Labor to claw back some of the seats it lost in 2012.

"The 2012 election was the most one-sided political result in Australian history; there has to be some form of correction to that, a righting of the ship, and you'd expect Labor to win lots of seats," Mr Green said.

"The question is, how many?"

The findings are based on an effective sample size of 83,422 respondents to Vote Compass between January 13 and January 28, 2015.

FAQ

What is this?

The ABC launched Vote Compass Queensland on Monday, January 12, in the lead-up to the state election.

It is a tool that allows voters to see how their views compare to the parties' policies.

The data was weighted across a range of demographic factors using the latest population estimates to be a true representation of opinion at the time of the field.

Vote Compass is not a random sample. Why are the results being represented as though it is a poll?

Vote Compass is not a poll. It is fundamentally an educational tool intended to promote electoral literacy and stimulate public engagement in the policy aspect of election campaigns.

That said, respondents' views as expressed through Vote Compass can add a meaningful dimension to our understanding of public attitudes and an innovative new medium for self-expression.

Ensuring that the public has a decipherable voice in the affairs of government is a critical function of a robust democracy.

Online surveys are inherently prone to selection bias but statisticians have long been able to correct for this (given the availability of certain variables) by drawing on population estimates such as Census micro-data.

The ABC applies sophisticated weighting techniques to the data to control for the selection effects of the sample, enabling us to make statistical inferences about the Australian population with a high degree of confidence.

How can you stop people from trying to game the system?

There are multiple safeguards in place to ensure the authenticity of each record in the dataset.

Vote Compass does not make its protocols in this regard public so as not to aid those that might attempt to exploit the system, but among standard safeguards such as IP address logging and cookie tracking, it also uses time codes and a series of other measures to prevent users from gaming the system.

Topics: elections, government-and-politics, qld

First posted