Archer wins … on Green exhaust?

Liberal Elise Archer has performed very strongly on preferences to win the fifth seat in Denison following a very close and dramatic Denison cutup.

The main attention early in the cutup was on the struggle between Andrew Wilkie and the Greens Helen Burnet to see who would be eliminated and who would contest the final seat with either Archer or Richard Lowrie. Burnet started effectively 136 votes behind Wilkie (taking into account the quota needed to elect Cassy O’Connor) and gained nearly 100 on the preferences of the Socialist Alliance, which was not surprising. From this point on, as minor Green candidates were eliminated, Burnet fell further behind Wilkie on leakage – again, much as expected.

The first surprise came with the exclusion of Liberal Jenny Branch. At this point Elise Archer was marginally behind Richard Lowrie and needed to catch him on the preferences of Branch and Matt Stevenson to stay in the race. I had expected Archer to struggle here as Lowrie and Branch are both Glenorchy councillors. But perhaps Archer’s higher profile as a new key candidate, and probably also gender-based voting, were important factors here as Archer surged ahead, gaining 488 preferences to Lowrie’s 179 (indeed, Lowrie did much worse than all the other Liberal candidates on this exclusion). Suddenly it was Lowrie who needed preferences, but Stevenson’s primaries didn’t help, and while Matthew Groom’s surplus off Stevenson was much more favourable, it was too little too late, and Archer avoided exclusion by 61 votes.

The next critical point was the exclusion of Lisa Singh. I thought this could slightly favour Wilkie over Burnet and Archer, but in fact Singh’s primaries favoured Burnet (452) over Wilkie (331) and Archer (296). Then, when Scott Bacon’s surplus from Singh was thrown, Archer (200) got most of what didn’t exhaust, with Wilkie (191) and Burnet (186) splitting the left-leaning preferences. In retrospect, it makes sense that Wilkie struggled on Labor preferences, since his primary vote was low in strong Labor suburbs – and this further confirms my finding that the Wilkie vote came mainly off the Liberals and the Greens. Unsurprisingly, 46% of the Bacon surplus exhausted.

Wilkie having outlasted Burnet by just 390 votes (had the Greens had the donkey vote instead of Wilkie, things might have been different there) the final equation was 6032 Burnet votes to be thrown, with Archer leading by 1641.

Obviously the Green preferences would favour Wilkie, but the question was, how strongly, and how many would exhaust? As it turned out, 35.1% of those who had voted for or preferenced Burnet did not vote far enough down the ticket to express a preference between Wilkie and Archer. Wilkie needed 70.9% of those Burnet votes that did not exhaust to go to him. He fell four percent short: 66.9% to Archer’s 33.1%, and Archer won.

Had the Burnet voters who voted for Wilkie not wasted their vote by stopping partway through instead of filling all the squares, things might have been very different. A mere 58:42 split of those votes in Wilkie’s favour (instead of them all going out the proverbial window) would have seen Wilkie elected. Of course, we cannot know how those voters would have voted had they continued, and we cannot assume they would have kept going in the same way as those who did fill the same ballot. But this is not the first time this sort of thing has apparently happened. In the 2006 Bass election, Liberal voters who stopped after voting 1-5 Liberal most likely caused the election of Kim Booth, when they could have elected a Labor candidate instead. The moral of the story is to always vote all the way through if you care about any party or candidate beside the one you voted 1-5 for. You will not help your preferred candidates or party by stopping. Ever. You will only play into the hands of your political opposites.

If there’s another moral for the Greens it is that in seats where one seat is a certainty and there is a chance of getting two candidates elected, too much focus on the number 1 candidate is pointless. Had the Green vote split somewhere even slightly closer to evenly between Helen Burnet and Cassy O’Connor, then Burnet would have at least outlasted Andrew Wilkie (though I doubt that would have stopped the Liberals winning). As it was the Greens did a reasonable job of promoting Burnet as their #2, and Burnet’s primary vote was exceptionally high in the circumstances, but I really question what endorsing a set 1-5 order in a seat like Denison can possibly achieve under the Hare-Clark system. Indeed, had the Green vote been much higher, it would have resulted in O’Connor getting a quota on the first count, which only causes increased leakage anyway.

The final great unknown is this: had Elise Archer not edged out Richard Lowrie by just 61 votes in the internal Liberal struggle, would Richard Lowrie have been able to hold off Wilkie on Helen Burnet’s preferences? My suspicion is that the answer is no, and that the Liberals have thus effectively won the seat (with all it may entail) by that little handful of votes.

In Franklin, very little happened of any interest. Jacquie Petrusma jumped to an 1800-ish vote lead on the surplus of Will Hodgman and moved further ahead late in the day to lead Tony Mulder by 2237 at the close of counting. Mulder would need to close this gap on Labor leakage and the preferences of #2 Green Adam Burling; as badly as Petrusma might be viewed by Green voters this won’t happen and Jacquie Petrusma will join David O’Byrne as new MHAs for Franklin.

About the only interest or amusement in the Franklin count was watching Greens #2 Adam Burling nearly become Greens #3 Adam Burling as he was nearly caught by running mate Wendy Heatley despite having the advantage of being preferenced by the Greens’ advertised ticket order (which gave him the inside running for Nick McKim’s surplus), and featured alongside Nick McKim on signs throughout the electorate. As it happened only 44% of those McKim voters who voted 2 for another Green gave their #2 to Burling. The Greens were never going to win two in Franklin anyway, but if they had been in contention for such a result, attempting to direct preferences to a candidate clearly seen by even Green voters in the Franklin electorate as too radical, too obscure or both would certainly have put an end to it. In my view this preselection howler was the only serious mistake the Greens made in the whole campaign.

In Lyons, we had the amusing spectacle of a very long series of exclusions before somebody (Tim Morris, as it turned out) was finally elected. There were close inter-party contests in both parties. The Liberal one was resolved when Jane Howlett, who had been closing fast on Mark Shelton, failed to close fast enough and lost to him by 194 votes. Shelton will be elected on her preferences (oh, and Rene Hidding might even deign to dawdle across the line too!) and then we will see the final acts in the battle between David Llewellyn and Rebecca White for the final seat.

There has not been much in that all day. Llewellyn started 159 ahead, and moved further ahead on the exclusion of Brendan Sullivan. But White more than negated that on the preferences of Nick Wright, and Llewellyn was only able to gain marginally on the preferences of defeated MHA Heather Butler. It was inevitable that White would move ahead on Greens preferences and she did, getting almost twice as many as Llewellyn. That left Llewellyn 76 behind, and on leakage from Playsted White increased her lead to 102 votes.

There are a lot of votes left in the Lyons count – 3387 still need to leave the Liberal ticket and go to Llewellyn, White or exhaust. Most will exhaust, the question being whether the remainder will favour Llewellyn substantially. There is no sign thus far that they will do so (leakage from both Liberal exclusions has favoured White) and White has the advantage that the candidate being excluded now is also young and female – had it been Shelton excluded instead of Howlett it might have been a different story. As the margin is close I will not write Llewellyn off but it is a tough position to be in at this stage. I am not surprised that Shelton has been elected. I did fieldwork in northern Lyons during the last week of the campaign, and the signage presence of the Shelton campaign in that area was very impressive – in contrast to the Playsted campaign which came across as all a bit laid-back.

In Bass, it is now overwhelmingly likely that Brant Webb has missed a seat (to remain in the count he needs to bridge 475 votes to Scott McLean on Greens preferences, and while McLean will certainly not get many of those, enough will exhaust that Webb will probably not even get 475 in his own right.) Webb’s preferences may well put both McLean and Wightman over Michele McGinity, so that her preferences determine which of them gets up, but I think McLean’s position is rather difficult. He is 290 behind and I expect the Green preferences to be quite unhelpful to him.

And that leaves Braddon, the only seat still in some level of cross-party doubt. I mentioned in my previous articles that Brett Whiteley really needed to outperform Adam Brooks on preferences to have a real chance of beating Paul O’Halloran, and that his best chance lay in a quirk of the system that made it possible for both Libs to beat the sole Green even if their team position appeared to be inferior. Not much has changed there, except that Whiteley missed opportunities to do so today. He started the day 1425 votes behind Adam Brooks and now trails Brooks by 1459.

The Liberals have closed the party total gap to the Greens by 410 votes (it now stands at 820). But that gain will all go out the window (and very probably then some) on leakage when the last minor Liberal, Leonie Hiscutt, is excluded. If those of Hiscutt’s preferences that do not leak or exhaust split roughly evenly between Brooks and Whiteley, then Whiteley will be something like 550 behind. It is all very well to point to Labor leakage favouring Liberals over Greens heavily in this electorate, but they tend to favour the Liberal candidates in total over lones Green rather than individually, simply by weight of numbers. This was seen with Eastley’s votes, in which 216 went Liberal compared to 110 Green, but as an individual candidate O’Halloran actually gained on Whiteley substantially on those votes. In fact, the major Liberal beneficiary was Hiscutt, who will probably leak a lot of them back.

Thus, if Whiteley is to gain significantly on O’Halloran, he will most likely not start doing it until Brooks crosses the line. But if Brooks is going to cross the line at all then that leaves Whiteley in the difficult position of trying to gain something like 1300-1500 votes on O’Halloran out of about 4700 Labor votes, close to half of which will probably exhaust. Whiteley would be needing a similar preference flow to the one Wilkie just failed to get in Denison, and there is no real reason to believe that he would get it. Thus it is best for Whiteley that Brooks actually doesn’t cross the line, and for that to happen, Whiteley needs to do extremely well on the Hiscutt votes. Nothing that happened today suggests that this will happen.

The Bartlett government has at best tied the Liberals on seat count, and the Liberals have a plurality of votes. It is probably 10-10-5 or it may still be 10-11-4. In this sense what happens in Braddon is not relevant to the pre-election conditions stated by Bartlett for attempting to remain in government, though a win of the final seat would certainly strengthen the Liberals’ hand in that regard.

As to whether anything stated by Bartlett before the election really has the slightest relevance, that is what we will very soon find out!