Federal election: Why were some seats called and uncalled?

The election may be over, but the counting is not!

You may have noticed that on the night of the election, many of the electorates were ‘called’, meaning a winner was announced.

Then, on Sunday, some of those seats were ‘uncalled’.

Why does this happen?

Counting

As soon as polls close, the Australian Electoral Commission, which oversees elections in Australia, starts the counting.

The AEC makes the data available as it comes through on their website. This is how the media (and anyone who wants it) can see the raw data.

The AEC never officially declares final results on election night.

The media

Any seats that are ‘called’ on the night are done so by the media and election analysts looking at the raw data.

These are just predictions based on how much of the vote is counted, and the margin by which there is a leader.

Everyone has their own threshold for when they’re confident enough to ‘call’ an electorate. Sometimes the media competes for who calls the results first.

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The 'calls'

On the night, the media ‘called’ more than 100 of the 150 seats in the House of Representatives.

Since then, however, some seats have become much closer, and they’ve had to be ‘uncalled’ (not sure that’s a word, but you get the point).

For example, on Saturday, TDA was among the media outlets to call the Melbourne seat of Goldstein for incumbent ‘teal’ MP Zoe Daniel.

At the time, Daniel was leading Liberal opponent Tim Wilson 54% - 46%.

However, yesterday, the results became much closer.

The same is true for another Melbourne seat held by a ‘teal’, Kooyong, although the margin there is bigger.

What now?

In the days following the election, AEC workers are mainly counting postal votes.

This takes time, because interstate and overseas votes take time to be sent in to the counting facilities.

In fact, any postal vote that arrives at the AEC up to 13 days after the election can be counted, as long as it was completed by 6pm on polling day.

TL;DR: It could be a while until we have the official results.