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Breakdown of preference flows in Bennelong 2004
The breakdown of preference flows in Bennelong in 2004 is now available. The results suggest that the donkey vote (that is, people numbering down the ballot paper without caring about it - I even know one expat who confessed to doing this so fast she did not even notice my name was on the paper) was about 450-550 votes, and the donkeying of independents was about 200-300 votes.
Added to this was some apparently random voting - 20% (427) votes that had accumulated to the CDP candidate went to the Greens in the 5th round. It really does not make any sense to preference the Greens immediately after the CDP since the Greens are directly opposed to almost every important CDP policy. Only 4.4% (20) of my votes went to the CDP, and 4.4% (44) of the votes accumulated to the Democrats went to the CDP. Patterns of non-sensical preference flows suggests there may be as many as 1500 people (2%) assigning preferences randomly, without caring who the candidates were. The number of preferences accumulated to the Democrats that went to Liberal also seems high, suggesting a small reverse-donkey component.
Those not voting seriously appear to have made up around 2500 (3.3%) of the vote. Informal votes made up 4762 (5.8%) of the vote, for a total of 9.1% of people who turned up to vote, but either expressed no effective preference or expressed a set of preferences that did not reflect any true preference.
9.1% - that is a lot of wasted votes.
As expected, a large percentage of my votes went to Howard. 43.9% went to Hannah (reflecting people who prefer independent but knew about at least my positions). Only 8.6% (39 votes) went to the Democrats, despite the Democrats being assigned position 2 on my how-to-vote cards. By contrast, 15.1% (68 votes) went directly to Liberal and 20.0% (90 votes) to the Greens.
The vote also reflects Wilkie's mistake in running as a Greens candidate - only 1,767 people who would otherwise prefer Liberal were willing to put the Greens first. As an independent his numbers would have been much higher - probably even enough to knock out the ALP candidate in second-last round. In the resulting two-way contest between an independent Wilkie and the Prime Minister, Wilkie would have cruised in.