The Liberal Party's Zed Seselja did not appear on any how-to-vote card other than his own. Pocock therefore is in the box seat to receive the vast majority of the preferences coming from the Greens, Medical Options, and Animal Justice, who all put Pocock as one of their six preferences on their how-to-vote card and did not put the Liberals on their card at all.

Of course, a lot of people do not follow how-to-vote cards or vote below the line. The 2019 ACT result tells us that 75 per of Green voters follow the card and put Labor second. But in 2022, the party preferenced Pocock ahead of Labor. In addition, with Labor's Katy Gallagher already elected, these votes would virtually all flow down to Pocock. Those Greens who do not follow the card massively preference leftist parties over the Liberals, according to the 2019 trend.

READ MORE:

It means Pocock can expect as much as 90 per cent of the Green preferences. That alone could be enough to put him over the quota line.

A quota is one-third of the vote plus one. If two candidates each get that, logically they each have more than any other candidate can possibly get to be elected to one of the two seats.

Labor's Katy Gallagher is on track to get almost exactly one quota.

Also to be considered are the five groups with no how-to-vote cards handed out: Kim for Canberra (who encouraged a second preference for Pocock), Cannabis, Sustainable, Progressives, and UAP. As of the count on Tuesday afternoon they shared in 18,178 votes. Of those, 13,797 were for the four progressive groups, and 3787 (about a quarter) for the UAP.

A lot of these will exhaust because neither Pocock nor Seselja will be among the six preferences they gave.

Of the non-exhausted votes of these groups, you would have to say that Pocock would get more than Seselja. Kim for Canberra, Cannabis, Sustainable and Progressive voters are unlikely to put a Liberal before an independent.

Seselja would be likely to get nearly all the preferences of any unexhausted UAP votes, but there will not be many of them, compared to the preferences of the left-of-centre groups and the preferences of groups which did not put him on their how-to-vote card. It will not be anywhere near enough.

MORE HULL:

Basically, Pocock will win the seat because he will get the lion's share of Green preferences and Seselja cannot hope to get enough preferences from other groups to make up for that. Indeed, he is unlikely to get more preferences than Pocock from those other groups.

Even if Seselja gets a much higher portion of the postal and late-counted vote than he got on Saturday, it will not be enough. So far he is getting 34 per cent of the very few postals that have been counted. That is barely over a quota so will not go very far towards catching up his deficit on the on-the-day votes and pre-polls.

As I wrote a week ago, Seselja would need to get about 28 per cent of the first preferences to get elected. He didn't. He won't.

We've made it a whole lot easier for you to have your say. Our new comment platform requires only one log-in to access articles and to join the discussion on The Canberra Times website. Find out how to register so you can enjoy civil, friendly and engaging discussions. See our moderation policy here.