Hi, I’m Ben Raue, and I run the Tally Room website. I’ve been running this website since 2008, covering elections in Australia.
I’ve focused on publishing useful data and background information to make it easier for my readers to understand Australian elections, alongside my own analysis and predictions. I’d like to think I’m known for being fair and rising above my own biases in my analysis.
I’ve particularly specialised in publishing thorough guides to each election, including informative maps for each electorate as well as candidate lists, past results and the history and geography of the seat. I’ve now published such a guide for every state and federal election since 2010. These guides have also been popular places to have discussions about a specific electorate in the comments sections.
I’ve also been publishing boundary maps for every Australian state and territory electoral redistribution over the last decade, as well as local government boundaries for most of the country and ward maps for Australia’s four biggest states.
More recently, I began compiling results from various state and local elections and publishing the results in an easy-to-use format, in my data repository. A lot of these results are hard to access, published as PDFs or even image files. I’ve aimed to publish them in a single spreadsheet, with matching files listing the polling places with latitudes and longitudes (often not provided by the electoral commission), and full lists of candidates.
Of course I also provide my own analysis and coverage of results, but the niche for this website has always been providing this foundational data which can help everyone do better work analysing elections.
This work was not previously sustainable. In the long run I wasn’t going to be able to keep up this work with the level of support I had at the end of 2017.
After a big push in 2018 and 2019 I now have enough donors to take the occasional day off from my day job to work on my various electoral projects. In particular, these donors allowed me to complete my guides to the federal, NSW and Victorian elections well in advance and launch a regular podcast.
I am now looking to expand this work following the federal election, with coverage of redistributions and the state and local elections due in 2020.
I am also currently completing a collection of recent election results as clean complete datasets (and I’d like to dive back into the history books to expand this collection). Donors who contribute $5 or more per month can access this complete collection, while a selection are availiable for free on the website. Most recently I published the full datasets for the last five Brisbane City Council elections and the last six Queensland state elections.
Finally I’m looking to use this quiet period to start a podcast on elections history.
Every dollar helps me provide more information to help you understand all of Australia’s elections.
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