Blogging Senate forecasts and results in the WA Senate re-election until officially declared.

Twitter: @AU_Truth_Seeker


Monday 31 March 2014

Palmernami?

Data is king.

In a world of asymmetric information, a data hound such as I relies on the evidence around me to form views and opinions. While my innovative Monte Carlo simulations are straight data crunchers, there is always the risk of "Garbage in - Garbage out". That is, if my initial primary vote estimates are erroneous, there's no point.

Sunday 30 March 2014

Latest Monte Carlo simulations using updated BludgerTrack estimations

What a week it's been. Saturday night and I fnially have time for another update.

The timing of this is propitious as yesterday saw a significant move in the polling estimates produced by Poll Bludger's "BludgerTrack"

In this weekly update, the LNP 2PP moved from 49.9% to 48.2%, on the back of weak polling performance by the Government. Additional information is that the Greens vote is slightly up and the LNP performance in WA is down even more than the trend.

Friday 21 March 2014

(UPDATED) Monte Carlo Simulation - who will get elected to the WA Senate?

Under the preferential model used in Australian Senate elections, the so-called "Droop Quota" ensures the quota is as low as possible while ensuring the number of candidates elected cannot exceed the number of vacancies.

Accordingly, in a half senate election, the quota becomes 14.29% of the total number of formal votes cast. Under a hypothetical scenario where the Liberal party were to poll 43%, Labor 29% and the Greens 15%, for example, the electees would be 3xLiberal, 2xLabor and 1xGreens, and no further counting would be necessary. Okay, so this is not going to happen! But it is possible that the two major parties may poll in the vicinity of these numbers, reducing the analysis to the final electee only.

I have used the following method for estimating the primary votes of each of the parties:

Thursday 20 March 2014

WA Half Senate election - T-16

Hello all,

Welcome back!

While I can't say how frequently I'll be able to post over the next two weeks (and possibly beyond), I will have an attempt at providing:
- new estimated seat percentages whenever new polling becomes available
- custom estimates for those of you who wish to say that my base percentage vote estimates are wrong
- potentially, a "live" election night blogging service.

My work and family life is much busier than September/October last year, but I'll do my best to write updates when I can.

I have exhumed my Monte Carlo Simulation model, loaded in the new WA preferences and reestimated primary votes for parties based on figures publicly available on the inimitable PollBludger's homepage.

I have also run several scenarios for what we might expect various parties to poll, refined some numbers due to differing ballot positions, superimposed national level swings, etc. And, I have also investigated some of $portsbet's juicier odds. Did you know, at the time of writing, PUP is $1.85 to get Zhenya "Dio" Wang elected to the senate? Or $1.85 to not get elected to the Senate? Take your pick!

More on this later.

Right now, I'll try to modernise my blog, lop off some old limbs, and generally do some gardening.