[LINK] live election results...

[Stilgherrian]

On 01/09/2010, at 9:47 AM, Tom Koltai wrote:
>>> The Official 2010 Federal Election Results
>>> 
>>>    * Across Australia 14,088,260 electors enrolled to vote.
>>>    * Currently 85.08% of the primary vote has been counted.
>>>    * The two party preferred count is 80.81% complete.
>>>    * The election results on this website were last
>> updated at 31/08/2010 11:17:36 AM.
>>>    * This website was last published at 31/08/2010 11:33:28 AM.
> <SNIP>
> 
> +2% and -2% on 20% of the uncounted votes means if we extrapolate:  That
> 
> +Tony is in...

Except that...

1. A linear extrapolation is not necessarily appropriate, particularly as eight seats have been temporarily removed from that total so they can be re-calculated as 2 party preferred figures between parties other than Labor versus Coalition; and, more importantly...

2. The national 2PP count across all electorates has precisely nothing to do with how parliament is or will be formed.

The ABC's Antony Green explained both of these points in detail yesterday, as did William Bowe at The Poll Bludger.

http://blogs.abc.net.au/antonygreen/2010/08/who-won-the-national-2-party-preferred-vote.html

http://blogs.crikey.com.au/pollbludger/2010/08/31/moral-majority/

The national 2PP figure is a myth, invented by the media so there's some "Who is winning?" figure to keep reporting on election night. The AEC caved in and put it on their Virtual Tally Room website. It's only "official" in the sense that it's calculated by the AEC from official vote counts, as opposed to Antony Green's projections based on his special-sauce algorithms.

The national 2PP figure is irrelevant to the actual result of the election in the same sense that "in possession of the ball" percentages do not determine who wins a football match. Only the number of actual goals scored does that. Everything else is wankery for the armchair pundits.

At this stage, what will decide who forms government is how the alliances will be formed between the MPs not members of the two major blocks. And all of them have said, repeatedly, that things like the nation 2PP figure will not be part of their calculus.


> The updates appear to be arriving at the speed of 15 minute intervals.

Correct. The AEC updates the master XML file from which all these displays are generated every three minutes, from memory, on election night and every fifteen minutes thereafter. There's then a lag of a minute or three as the displays are generated from the master file.

Stil


-- 
Stilgherrian http://stilgherrian.com/
Internet, IT and Media Consulting, Sydney, Australia
mobile +61 407 623 600
fax +61 2 8569 2006
Twitter: stilgherrian
Skype: stilgherrian
ABN 25 231 641 421