auspol

Predictive modeling of national, state and electorate level results for the Voice referendum. Polling place level analysis shows that polling places with high levels of Indigeneity generally had strong majorities for Yes.

I average public polls estimating voting intentions for the Voice referendum. My analysis produces estimates of daily levels and trend in the proportion supporting “Yes” and the distinctiveness of each pollster’s estimates. Updated regularly as polls are published.

Slide deck, presentation to the Australian Society for Quantitative Political Science, Australian Catholic University, Melbourne, Dec 13 2022

Op-ed published by Guardian Australia to coincide with the release of the 2022 Australian Election Study on Monday 5 December 2022.

After each federal election the Australian Electoral Commission produces a file of counts of voters by the SA1 in which they reside and the polling places at which they turned out for House of Representatives elections. Curiously, summing these counts to the polling place level produces voter turnout counts that do not match the turnout figures published elsewhere by the AEC in official election results. Although the discrepancies are small, better understanding their sources would offer reassurance about election integrity, consistent with the norms of transparency and rigour that are enviable hallmarks of Australian election administration.

We derive the correspondence between NSW legislative districts and postcodes via a spatial merge, using the G-NAF and a MapInfo file of district boundaries from the NSW Electoral Commission. We also provide an interactive tabular summary and map of the correspondence.

Betting markets are often said to provide more accurate forecasts of elections than polls, despite evidence to the contrary. We contrast the trajectory of Sportsbet’s implied probability that either party would win the 2022 Australian federal election and the performance of Sportsbet’s markets in all 151 House of Representatives seats.

“Sophomore surge” is the tendency of incumbents to win more votes in their first bid for re-election relative to their preceding (and successful) candidacy as a challenger, as they acquire the advantages accruing to incumbents: name recognition and public-funded resources chief among them. Sophomore surge seems particularly pronounced for independents and in postal voting, a form of voting becoming more widely used in Australian federal elections. Incumbents are granted privileged access to a copy of the electoral roll that identifies postal voters inter alia (per §90B of the Commonwealth Electoral Act). Incumbents’ access and major party experience in exploiting this information is the source of this particular form of incumbency advantage, denied to new entrants to the electoral marketplace.

Election day summary of Sportsbet betting markets for “party to form next government” and all 151 House of Representatives seats.

At the end of the 2022 Australian federal election campaign, a simple poll average estimated that the Coalition would win 46.5% of the two-party preferred vote. Correcting for the average level of bias in the five previous elections (2007 to 2019), this estimate was shifted to 47.9% Coalition TPP. This corrected estimate corresponds exactly to the Coalition’s actual result in the 2022 election.