A fair bit has now been written about the Australian election and which electorates swung hard, and the characteristics of those places and the type of people who voted for each party.

Beyond electorates, it’s possible to get an even more detailed picture of the geographic trends by mapping results at the polling booth level. This approach reveals some potentially surprising results, such as the small areas within the larger electorate where minor parties like the Greens or One Nation won out over the major parties, or blocs of booths where independents won the day.

For the first map, we’ve taken the primary vote result and mapped it to a Voronoi diagram based on polling place locations. This process creates a region for each polling place based on its location, and the location of other polling places.

You can read more about the technical details below.

The initial view is coloured by the party with the highest primary vote in that area, and you can also view the map by specific parties using the drop-down menu.

In Victoria and southern NSW the inroads independents made into the electorates of Mallee and Farrer stand out, as well as Indi, where Helen Haines won the seat.

There are a few interesting areas in NSW, such as the Hunter electorate, where the One Nation candidate had the highest primary vote in Milbrodale. There is a pocket of booths on the north coast where the Greens had the highest primary, and one booth, Elands, further down the coast in the electorate of Lyne where the same thing happened.



Queensland again has a small number of booths outside the city where the Greens had the highest primary vote, and two areas just north of Gladstone where One Nation had the highest primary vote.

In the second map, created by Jack Zhao from Small Multiples, every vote cast is displayed as a single dot randomly placed within Voronoi areas based on polling booth locations.



This view gives a sense of population density to the election results, clearly showing the sparse, non-metropolitan regions against the more dense towns and cities.

If you want to read even more about geographic trends in the 2019 election, check out this piece from the ABC, and there are a heap of posts on specific areas at the Tally Room blog.

Notes

The first map uses Voronoi regions generated from polling booth locations, and then clipped by electorate boundaries. The second map uses a similar approach, but does not clip by electorate boundaries.

In the first map, only votes recorded for the electorate that the polling booth is in are shown. The second map shows all votes made at a polling booth, and thus includes votes made at a polling booth that are for an external electorate.