Pre-WA

Just a quick (and late) post this week – a short and sweet intro to the WA Senate Election. This is partly because I am yet to determine the most effective resources for upper-house predictions (or lower-house if you are in Tasmania…) and partly the result of the hectic weekend I’ve had.

For those who haven’t been following electoral news yet somehow ended up here – or for the readers of the future deprived of the context – the WA Senate election last year was complicated by a relatively large number of votes disappearing between the first count and recount of ballots. It is currently believed that these ballots were stored near a quantity of material to be recycled and thus destroyed.

The High Court, in its guise as the Court of Disputed Returns, has agreed with the AEC that a re-count is required. This is unfortunate for the last parties elected by either count (no doubt hoping against hope that the ruling would install them by validating the most favourable count), but also for the Abbott Government. There has been some wild speculation that the Libs are likely to increase their share of the primary vote because they traditionally perform well in WA. However, this is flawed for several reasons. Most obviously, the Liberal Party’s support is lower now than at the election. As a result – regardless of the general attitude of the state – the vote in WA is likely to have dropped relative to the disputed return.

A large part of the Liberal vote last year was undoubtedly less of a vote for a Liberal government and more of a vote against Labor. Having punished the ALP, voters turned on Abbott in an unprecedented backlash. The polling is closer now, but nothing like the landslide of half a year ago.

Further, I suspect that – despite the apparent (yet unfounded) dislike of hung parliaments – there is greater support for minor-party balance of power Senators in the Senate. This could play against the Government.

Over the weekend I’ve been talking with an employee of a sitting Labor member who is cautiously optimistic about the vote in WA. But let’s not fall into the trap of assuming that internal data is better ore more reliable than public polling.

 

Briefly:

Here is the Senate as it stood before the election of last year’s senators:

Here is the current state of play:

 

Clearly the Coalition cannot form a majority in the Senate. However, the number of cross-bench Senators (particularly from micro-parties) will mean that the Libs should be able to past many laws with the right negotiations.

Of particular interest is the Repeal of the Carbon Tax. Apart from the large role this (and the mining tax repeal) has played in the WA campaign, Abbott had promised to act on this promise at the first possible instance. If the repeal fails pass the Senate, we get to dust of section 57 of the constitution:

If the House of Representatives passes any proposed law, and the Senate rejects or fails to pass it, or passes it with amendments to which the House of Representatives will not agree, and if after an interval of three months the House of Representatives, in the same or the next session, again passes the proposed law with or without any amendments which have been made, suggested, or agreed to by the Senate, and the Senate rejects or fails to pass it, or passes it with amendments to which the House of Representatives will not agree, the Governor-General may dissolve the Senate and the House of Representatives simultaneously. But such dissolution shall not take place within six months before the date of the expiry of the House of Representatives by effluxion of time.

In other words, we re-vote. Regardless of one’s political position, a double-disillusion vote will have both negative (e.g. financial) and positive (e.g. blog posts) impacts.

Here’s the current state of the repeal:

 

In addition to the Coalition, the DLP, LDP, FFP and PUP all support a repeal (the fact that many oppose the Libs’ (and perhaps all) carbon reduction policy is unlikely to dissuade them). The ALP and Greens are in opposition.

That leave’s Xenophon in SA and the Motoring Enthusiasts in Victoria. The former opposes the Carbon Tax, but has his own plan. I doubt Senator Xenophon will support the repeal unless his scheme or one similar is implemented (which it will not be). The latter has no policy on the matter and will probably side with whoever can offer the most with regards to the policies they do have. Which will naturally be the ruling party.

Therefore the Libs or other anti-Carbon Tax proponents need to win four seats for a majority. Many spectators expect the Coalition to hold three seats of their own. The Left recieving the other three looks like a stretch. At this point, then, a double-disillusion seems unlikely.

[Addendum: I stated that the MEP will 'probably side with whoever can offer the most with regards to the policies they ... have' in the absence of a carbon policy of their own (short of small government ideology (anti-tax) and non-specific sustainability principles (pro-action)). However, on reflection, the Motoring Enthusiasts will not want to risk their seat -- which is precarious enough already -- in a double-dissolusion election. This alone may be enough to pressure the MEP and other minor low-primary-vote parties into line. Assuming a minor party gets in in WA, the three Coalition seats may be enough to command a majority on the repeal.]

Score sheet

With Bob Such's sudden illness, the pressure on Geoff Brock to deliver a stable government left only one realistic option. To side with the Libs would leave the state indefinately poised with a 23-23 seat split between the Labor party and the Liberal-Brock coalition until Such sould either declare his intention or remove himself from office.

Today's announcement that Geoff Brock will deliver governemnt to the Labor Party has finally resolved the political deadlock in South Australia. Additionally, with more than a week since the vote, most of the seats SA can be called with confidence enough for me to consider publishing the results of my predictions.

Although the Tasmanian Legislative Assembly relies on a progressive counting system that requires more time to calculate, I am prepared to announce my results there too.

South Australia:

Under the old scoring system -- requiring over 90% accuracy to qualify as a decent prediction -- we did well in both houses of the South Australian parliament. In the lower house we got 91.1%, and in the upper 90.9%.

However, after the atypical federal election last year we altered our methodology to account for the general predictability of the election -- speciffically my success must be measured against a baseline determined by the polling. If I am doind worse than consulting the general polling something is wrong. If I am doing better, the question is how much better.

interestingly, despite a clear Liberal lead early in the campaign, the TPP polling prior to election day was where it was prior to 2010 (ALP 48%, Lib 52%). Thus the baseline predicts no change in seats.

This table indicates the baseline, my predicion, and the results:

I called four electorates incorrectly. The baseline called four seats incorrectly. However, because the baseline did not have two tossups, giving it a 91.5% success to my 91.1%.

However, the polling data for my predictions were based on data two weeks older, under which system the Libs were polling two percentage points higher and the baseline would have given a 93.5% accuracy.

So that's not great.

In the senate I'm still trying to develop a baseline system, since upper house polling is rarely conducted.

It seems all of my predictions were spot-on, however, except for the last seat which is always a devilish one, since it is more to do with scraping together 10th and 20th hand votes. Basically every now and then another party keels over and, like any good fantasy adventurer, the other parties loot the body and eventually the last one standing is crowned king. Normally this is the annoying useless kid who was obviously concealing the unheard of, untapped magical reserves that reaveal his true identity as the chosen one of prophesy. The same is true of politics, except there are thirty harmless kids who are backed by thirty seperate prophecies.

This time, however, the mighty good/evil warrior looks posied to do the sensible thing and not die heroicly/idiotically to clear the way for the little guys.

Although Powerful Communities did well on the preference swaps, that is of no real value if you are the first grouped candidate to drop out, which they were. At the moment it looks like the last place will go to the ALP, but we won't know until the count concludes.

In the absence of any better measure of success, we'll have to settle for a result of greater than 90%.

Tasmania:

The count is still continuing in Tasmania, wiht two seats still well in the unknown basket -- Lyons 5th is looking to be a close run between the ALP and the Greens, and Braddon 5th has Palmer united 115 votes ahead of the Greens and 375 ahead of the ALP on first preferences. The high ALP-Greens trade is likely to cost the PUP, but stranget things have happened.

Expected results

This is where things go really bad for us. Not only have I not developed any reliable system of predicting multi-candiadte election processes (the SA upper house was a lucky result), but the predictions were formulated over a couple of hours. Unsurprisingly, we lost a few here:

Predicted results

Bass: 5/5
Braddon: 4/4
Denison: 4/5
Franklin: 4/5
Lyons: 4/5 (expected)
TOTAL: 21/24 (87.5%)

Compare that with our baseline:

Baseline

Bass: 5/5
Braddon: 4/5 (possibly 5/5)
Denison: 4/4
Franklin: 4/5
Lyons: 4/5 (possibly 5/5)
TOTAL: 21/24 (possibly 23/24 = 95.8%)

At best we equal the baseline and get a neutral score. At worst, (if Lyons and Braddon both elect a Green) the baseline scores over 95% -- a brilliant score in the old system and more than 8 percentage points ahead of us.

So, this new scoring system is givving us a pretty bad thrashing. however, it is important to realise that the simple application of polling is currently out-predicting us. This illustrates the usefullness of the Mackerras pendulum.

The aim here is not to create a tool that performs better than the pendulum. That would be a herculean feat for a professional and a near impossibility for an amateur. Instead, I am trying to develop a suite of tools, each less useful than the pendulum but providing a more accurate prediction when used in conjunction with each other.

Clearly there is still a way to go.

Appologies to Dr K. Bonham

Hoisted on my own petard

I have made a large error in my scheduling, as a result of the very infographics for which this blog is named. In this post I placed the Tasmanian state election in June, the latest possible date for it. I later confirmed from multiple reliable sources that that state's Legislative Council elections would be held in May. Unfortunately I failed to appreciate that the Tasmanian Legislative Assembly election might not fall on that day, because in my mind it was already posted for nearer the middle of the year.

Several sources have since obliquely mentioned the Assembly election date, but I either ignored these because I did not trust the sources or thought they were relating to the 2010 election, since they mentioned the clash with the South Australian elections.

Unfortunately, the Tasmanian floating election date has, yet again, been picked to coincide with the SA vote. This means that 1) we are again likely to lose Antony Green to the island state since the Hare-Clarke system is far more interesting to observe, and 2) I have had to summarise an entire election's worth of analysis in one day.

Predictions

This is looking to be a pretty clear-cut win for the Liberals by all measures, with primary vote polling at just shy of 40% compared to the ALP's 16%.

The Tasmanian Legislative Assembly is elected from five electoral districts using the Hare-Clarke system, which largely resembles most Legislative Council voting or the federal Senate vote. As a result, multiple MPs are elected from each electorate. The Tasmanian state seats conveniently coincide with the 5 federal seats, and 5 candidates are elected from each for a total of 25 candidates.

Because this system is so similar to the various upper-house systems used elsewhere (except Queensland, which doesn't have an upper house) it is not surprising to see the past results largely mirroring this: minor parties – specifically the Greens - regularly hold the balance of power. There is some talk, however, that this election could see a Liberal majority government.

Unfortunately, since I am still developing systems to deal with the upper-house predictions elsewhere, I'm relying on untested methods for these predictions. The VDTA is of no use since transferable votes obscure any trends and the colour-coding for 5 different simultaneous incumbents is a nightmare. There is no pendulum, since the multiple incumbents again ruins the idea of a two-party swing. And, because Tasmanians have a much higher interest in elections – indicated, for example, in their significantly more common below-the-line votes and engagement with more complex voting systems – you cannot rely on preferences to flow predictably through party guidance. In the Hare-Clarke system there is no above-the-line vote either. On top of that Robson Rotation randomises the order of candidates in a column, so donkey voting and linear preference flows are drastically underpowered, making it very much a candidate-eat-candidate style contest.

Nonetheless, here is a wild stab at the dark:

If the polling is uniform and approximate the quota as a percentage of the votes, we can expect two Liberal candidates, a Labor candidate and a Green. The final seat will come down to the opinions of the 23% listed as undecided, as well as the Palmer United and other groups' flow-on effects.

This, in the absence of a pendulum, is the baseline we will compare ourselves against. The remaining seat has, as a tie-break- been assigned as per the federal incumbent of that seat (although of course the issues were different and opinions have shifted in the last 6 months:

The Independent federal Incumbent in Denison requires the black square – a tossup. With 25 candidates to predict we are allowed 1 tossup.

This just gives the Liberals the 13 required to rule in their own right.

However, swings are rarely uniform. There has been a shift to the right in Tasmania, demonstrated not only in the state polls but also in the Federal election, with Bass, Braddon and Lyons all being taken from the ALP by the Coalition.

What we do have, to aid our predictions, is the past history of the seats since 1998 when the system was last drastically changed (creating the current 5x5 candidate structure):

We can firstly see that each seat has traditionally been left-dominated, which is part of the reason the conservative result in Tasmania confused me so much last year. Then again, given that the Labor government in Tasmania has held power since 1998 under Jim Bacon, this is not so surprising.

The Liberals have been historically strongest in Bass and Braddon, so three blue seats there are certainly not out of the question. Denison has a large independent contingent, possibly inspired by the victory of Andrew Wilkie in the federal seat. This, as always, throws a spanner in the works. While it is tempting to copy the polling and use our tossup here, my gut feeling is that the seats will end up with a party, and probably a member of the Labor-Liberal-Green triopoly. The risk of a Glenn-Druery style preference swap is, fortunately, something we do not need to consider due to the lack of above-the-line voting.

Another tool we could use, in theory, is to look at the smaller LegCo seats that make up the Assembly/federal seats for hints about demographics.

For simplicity, where Assembly electorates cut through LegCo seats a straight line has been used to divide the colours. in reality the boundaries are more complex.

Unfortunately, the Tasmanians have foiled that by actually getting to know their candidates and regularly voting in Independents.

“Enough to undermine any kind of cross-house correlation?” you may ask.

“Yes,” I may reply.

“Golly Gosh!” you may exclaim.

To quote Wikipedia: “The Labor party is the most successful of any political party in the council's history, having elected a total of 18 members.”

(To put that in perspective, South Australia has 22 Council seats and the ALP holds 8, which is pretty well consistent with precious Councils. Taking rough figures, SA has twice as many MLCs as Tasmania, so a Tasmanian equivalent of the current SA LegCo would be 4 ALP members. In short, after accounting for the size of Tasmania's parliament, we would have elected roughly as many Labor politicians to the LegCo in 20 years as the Tasmanians have since theirs was founded. In 1825. And this is the most successful party.)

So, getting back to the map, at best there is circumstantial evidence for Labor support in Lyons and Liberal support in Braddon and Denison. However, the seat history is the best indicator we have so far. Given the Low support for the ALP in Bass, I suspect the prediction here will play our as per the polling, 3 Lib, 1 ALP and 1 Green. Lyons and Franklin on the other hand have been pretty reliable for the ALP, so I'd expect to see them retain the status quo. In Denison, I expect a Liberal gain to take up the black square. The seat has been the Greens' strongest performer, so this will probably come from the ALP instead.

Braddon, however, has only elected one Green. It is also important to note that the Greens vote has collapsed in the primary polling to roughly the same extent as the ALP (from 22% down to 14% compared with 23% down to 16%), and if the Greens lack support anywhere, it'll be Braddon. For this reason I'm giving the Libs three seats, the ALP one and using our precious tossup on the last. The Greens may hold on, but if they lose any seat (and the polling suggests they will) it should be here.

These predictions feel very unreliable to me, even compared to my normal standards. However, I can't really justify pulling out of a prediction because it is too hard, and hopefully our new scoring system of measuring results against a polling baseline will save us from too bad a result.

You know the guesses are bad when your best hope is that the polling is unreliable...

Additional

Another map to colour in!

The ABC has candidate summaries here. (Along with links to their websites. And they also had links for the SA parties too this election. I think they're trying to steal my gimmick of trying to be useful...)

Sample Ballot and Map

For those of us who like to plot our vote in advance, I normally produce a false ballot to print ant take to the polling station so that you know how to vote below the line. The ABC has already done this for us: http://blogs.abc.net.au/.a/6a00e0097e4e68883301a5117d71e9970c-popup

Also, here is a map to colour in on election night. Lots of fun for the whole family, as the numbers drip-feed in...

Enjoy!

Predictions II

Legislative Council:

At the federal election last year I learned, to my cost, that applying lower house polling to the upper house is seriously flawed. I suspect the large number of upper house minor parties not contesting lower house seats is a major factor in this.

Unfortunately Legislative Council polling is difficult to come by, so we need some kind of proxy.

The South Australian Legislative Council has 22 members, with 11 alternating members elected every election. At the federal election the state elected 6 senators – 2 from the Liberal camp, 2 from the ALP, 1 Greens candidate and one Independent in the form of Nick Xenophon. Applying this to the LegCo suggests, with rounding, 4 each from the Libs and ALP, 2 Greens and probably only 1 from the Xenophon group (who, just so we can move on past this point, are obviously not running Xenophon as an actual candidate. Some people have suggested this is false advertising, but similar complaints against the Palmer United or Katter's South Australian Party candidates are less common.)

Obviously opinions have shifted over time, and there is a different host of minor parties, but everyone pretty well accepts that the Libs and ALP should win at least 3 seat each, and 4 is quite possible.

The Greens are, by virtue of being the nations de facto third party, an obvious tip for some further seats. They have regularly won single seats, but with their lower house vote in decline from 2010 (down 2.3 pp on Newspoll) their chance of picking up more than one is pretty well out of the question. That said, their predicted 7% primary vote is just shy of the 8.33% quota, so one seat is almost assured. I would also tip, based on previous wins, the Family First and Xenophon groups to get a seat. Their support is steadfast, if small, and with support from ultra-minor parties but lower primary base than the Greens, they may well just struggle over the line (Particularly the FFP which has good preferential support as we will see below). There is the possibility that Dignity 4 Disability may repeat its previous success, but since this was a last-place scraping together of the remaining scraps I think luck and preference deals served them well once and cannot be relied on again.

The remaining two seats could go to the Libs or ALP, or else be scraped together through luck and preference deals to push some minor party over the line. Enter Glenn Druery, stage right.

Apart from long-distance cycling, Mr Druery's main claim to fame is organising preference flows between minor parties to maximising the chance of one winning. This is not a new phenomena, but it is one that has certain consequences. Remember everyone's surprise last year when the motoring enthusiasts and the sports party got in off some very low primary votes? Their inclusion in Mr Druery's preference swapping circle is no coincidence. In fact, Mr Druery has been using electoral math to get typical no-hope groups into government since1999.

His success is such that there are unconfirmed rumours of six-digit figures being paid for his services, although this is generally inferred to apply to his side-job of favouring the parties that pay him over others in his calculations.

Now I have no problems with minor parties being elected. Heck, I bemoan the current political duopoly and the robust debates it robs this country of. However, 95% of people vote above the line (though, I suspect, the number is lower among minor parties and higher with the “don't really care” voters who back the major players.) That's an awfully large percentage of the vote to be splashing about in. And the deals that are arranged are often funnelled so that a vote for the pro-life religious right parties can end up with the secular pro-choice candidates and vice versa. And that is where I object. It is bad enough people do not pay attention to where their vote ends up, but to exploit that on the basis of electoral math is the heinous crime of psephology's evil twin.

This is pretty much what goes on behind the scenes of electoral blogging.

With Druery's system hinted to favour the Shooters and Fishers and a rival alliance organised by the LDP expected to back the LDP (go figure) who knows how this will pan out. However, here is a quick look at preference flows.

I have taken the preferences directly from the blog of an old school (and old-school) friend of mine, the great Casey Briggs, whose own (more professional) psephological musings should have been referenced here long before now. He has conveniently done away with the candidate-by-candidate preference flows and distilled their essence down to a party-specific level. Mr Briggs is far too wise to take this to a predictive level, but I am not.

Please find bellow two sets of averages. The first is the average placement of each party on the preference lists (N.B. This does include their own ticket. Split tickets are given half-weight per ticket.) The second is the same without factoring in the Libs, ALP, Greens, FFP or Xenophon in order to look at orchestrated flows between the minor parties. The lower the average the higher they average on the tickets and the more likely they are to be preferenced into a seat.

In both cases, Powerful Communities comes out ahead, followed by the Multicultural Party and then Mark Aldridge. This can only be a rough indication, since the order parties drop out will be a major factor and a lower average may be derived from some high and low preferences, which will do better than a better average on more mediocre preferences. On this latter point, Mr Briggs has also conveniently highlighted the least preferenced party/group here (P.S. It's Xenophon by a long way). He also suggest that such frequently low-rating parties will have to rely more on their primary votes, however I would argue that if this is countered with some high-placed preferences this is not necessarily the case. Indeed, I would even suggest the number of high-preferences is more indicative of preference advantage than the number of low ones. As I said, a polarising party with a lot of second and last preferences will do better than someone consistently ranked in the middle.

I have taken the previous data and looked at who gets the most second, third and fourth preferences (bellow) and also created a weighted average thus: ((Number of 2s x 4)+(Number of 3s x 2)+(Number of 4s))/7 (i.e. the number of 2s is twice as important as the number of 3s, which is twice as important as the number of 4s). This is provided in the summary.

Family First does best on the second preferences, shortly ahead of Powerful Communities. In the overall summary we see Powerful Communities take the lead, the Family First, then the Multicultural Party. Given that we have already given a seat to Family First and they are highly unlikely to win a second, I would suggest that the final two seats could be won by the Libs, the ALP, or Powerful Communities. The Multicultural Party is also in with a shot if the primary vote for the big-guns is low enough. Dignity 4 Disability is an outside shot. Palmer is, of course, well publicised but I think the public has moved on.

Unfortunately with only 11 seats, there is not enough room for even one tossup, so I am going to place the following guesses:

This would give the complete LegCo as:

Independents are ex-Labor Bernard Finnigan, Dignity for Disability's Kelly Vincent, Nick Xenephon Group candidate John Darley and Mark Henley for Powerful Communities.

Please note that, although it is practically unheard of for anyone to not be elected in the order of their names within the party, names in the above are indicative only, primarily to identify which IND is being predicted. Selecting the correct party but wrong candidate (except for Independents) will still be considered a correct prediction.

TL;DR: Minimum of 3 seats each for Liberals and Labor, with widely accepted high probability of a Greens, Xenephon and Family first in the mix.
Preferences favour Powerful Communities as minor parties, although the seats could also be taken by the major parties
The SA LegCo does not provide enough scope for tossups
Prediction as per penultimate image leading to a full council as shown in the final image.

Predictions

Predictions?

Predictions.

Predictions:

Previously I have waited a lot closer to election day before finalising my predictions, often posting the eve before. This election, however, I will attempt to give my predictions a week early so that next week's post can be the post-election analysis and the weekend after that we can transition speedily into the April WA senate re-elections. This schedule should, hopefully, give us enough time to attempt some analysis of the data, consider the implications and cast some predictions before April 5.

Also, in the interests of full disclosure, I should state that (as of last Thursday) I am signed up to conduct letter-boxing and the handing out of how to vote cards for Your Voice (Legislative Council Group X). That said, if I allow my own political biases to influence my predictions it will only serve to skew my calculations and cost my accuracy record, so if anything my vested interests are in being impartial.

Shall we begin?

Legislative Assembly:

Most of our analysis has been focussed on the lower house, so lets start here. There are 47 seats to call, which means we can call a maximum of 2 tossups. Looking back on the post from two weeks ago, I short-listed some seats to watch:

• Fisher, Frome and Mount Gambier are held by Independents
• Adelaide, Bright, Dunstan, Light, Newland and Unley are held by one major party but generally lean to the other
• Colton, Frome (again), Hartley, Little Para, Newland (again), Mawson, Mount Gambier (again) and Unley (again) are not strongly affiliated with any party
• Adelaide (again), Ashford, Bright (again), Colton (again), Dunstan (again), Elder, Florey, Hartley (again), Light (again), Mawson (again), Mitchel, Morialta, Mount Gambier (again), Newland (again) and Wright are within the marginal (< 6%) range of the pendulum.

Also of note are the three seats from the weekbefore that were not consistently Liberal or Labor based on past trends: Adelaide (again), Bright (again) and Light (again).

This gives us 19 seats to watch: Adelaide, Ashford, Bright, Colton, Dunstan, Elder, Fisher, Florey, Frome, Hartley, Light, Little Para, Mawson, Mitchel, Morialta, Mount Gambier, Newland, Unley and Wright. The remaining 28 are reasonably uncontroversial and are called as follows:

As it happens, all of these seats are projected to fall this way based on their lean (determined two weeks ago) and by all 5 reliable maps from three weeks ago. With 6/6 sources backing these predictions, these are the easiest of the easy to call.

I have not factored in the pendulum yet, but by definition these seats are all held by there predicted winners by at least 6% and in most cases over 10%.

The electoral boundaries of this state are supposed to be redrawn each election to correct the balance so that the state-wide vote roughly reflects the seat-by-seat make-up of the parliament. As such, the two party preferred vote should be roughly analogous to the end result (note that SA is just about the only place to do this).

The February polling by Newspoll has the vote at 46-54 favouring the Libs. This is a two percentage point swing from the pre-election polling of 2010 (48-52)*. Using the baseline predictive model used by most media outlets, an across-the-board swing of 2% to the Libs will see Asford, Bright, Elder and Hartley changing hands, giving the Libs 22 seats, Labor 22 and 3 Independents.

Time to dust off the hung-parliament alarm bell?

While I am loathe to accept a uniform swing in all seats, lets assume that no Liberal-leaning or Liberal-held seats are going to go against the trend. This is an assumption that has messed me up more than once, but I have no predictive tool to identify these contrary seats so I've got nothing better.

Of the remaining 13 seats, 3 are Independent vs Liberal seats in need of closer attention. The rest are listed as uncertain because of their past trends and/or their margin. Lets assume that seats that are of uncertain history but with a safe margin can be called based on that margin, and conversely that seats with a narrow margin but firm historical leaning can be expected to follow the previous results. In other words, where one measure has identified the seat is close, we will have to rely on the other indicators for a clue. This settles 8 seats:

The Independent battles need to be assessed individually. Given that Mount Gambier always has been Independent since adopting the name in 1997 (Many consider this seat a continuation of Gordon) it is possible this will continue. The Independent vote always seems to out-poll the ALP then scoop up the preferences for a narrow win, often for a candidate overlooked by the Libs, so the 0.4% margin between IND and LIB does not necessarily make this a certain loss to the Liberal Juggernaut. Incumbency will assist Don Pegler. The swing expected swing from ALP to LIB might give the Libs the edge, though, undercutting the ALP-flow on. That said, most ALP voters who go on to boost the Independent might be more likely to switch to Pegler than completely leap the ideological fence.

There is hardly any chance the ALP will out-poll Pegler – last election Labor's 2,724 primary votes were dwarfed by Pegler's 7,482. I'm going to assume most of the people disaffected with the ALP will still be retained by Pegler for an IND win, but my prediction is a tossup.

Is this the end of the ancient grey one?

In Frome, Geoff Brock out-polled both major parties and, even with a loss of first-preference support, is further boosted by almost everyone. Confident win for Brock here.

In Fisher, Bob Such had the highest Independent margin from 2010, almost out-polling Labor and Liberal combined. That said, the Liberal candidate Sam Duluk has been playing a very high-profile campaign against Such. Such has been rather high-profile in the parliament, however, sitting on several committees. I again expect an Independent win.

It is odd that, in a campaign where both parties have been reasonably likeable and approved of (cf. last year's federal election) the Independents are expected to do so well. However, I am calling Fisher, Frome and Mount Gambier all as Independent retained:

That just leaves Hartley and Mawson. Both are Labor leaning, though slight, both are marginal, and both were found to be ALP in full average of seat histories map, the 10% opacity layer map and the VDTA, but Liberal in the history average since 1993. Hartley has a 0.1% margin, so I'm willing to call that Liberal. Mawson is 4.5, and may well resist the swing. I could call this my second and final tossup, but there is something nagging me about Ashford's 0.6% margin. I'm going to call Mawson ALP and move Ashford to the tossups.

Final guess. Unless I change my mind, of course...

Mount Gambier is either going to be a conservative IND or a Lib. Although state and federal politics has seen conservative Independents back the Labor party in the none-to-distant past (probably because the Labor party will take their threats to cross the floor more seriously), I suspect any errors I have made will only favour the Coalition who, while possibly struggling to take the house outright, should have no difficulty in forming an alliance -- something Steven Marshall has explicitly not ruled out.

So, tell me, where did I go wrong? Post your predictions and correction below. Or, you know, don't. It's easier to claim you were right all along that way.

Blind guesses at the Legislative Council to follow shortly.

TL;DR: Predictions as per final image. With the exception of Ashford (relegated to Tossup due to a small margin) the certainty of each prediction is greatest when they can be assigned in the earlier charts, with the more dubious results added in the final graphic.

*Although the TPP result favoured the Libs and the ALP retained power, the boundaries were not drastically altered to compensate since the reason for this was determined to be a curiosity of the election rather than a demographic shift.