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Joining this Reddit AMA is Antony Green AO, the former Chief Election Analyst at the ABC. For more than three decades, he helped Australians follow election nights as votes came in and seats changed hands. Antony joined the ABC as an election researcher in 1989 and retired from the broadcaster after the 2025 federal election. Across his career, he worked on around 90 federal, state and territory elections, including 13 federal polls.
Antony brought an unusual mix of political knowledge, mathematics and computer programming to television. After the 1990 federal election, he helped design the ABC’s election analysis system, which turned incoming counts and preference estimates into seat predictions. His first major federal election night role came in 1993. The work behind the screen involved preparing candidate and polling-place data, analysing redistributions and testing how preferences might flow.
Beyond broadcasts, Antony has written extensively about election results and electoral boundaries, contributed to parliamentary inquiries and examined how different voting systems work. He is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Sydney and was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia for his service to election analysis and public understanding of democracy. His particular interests include electoral systems, voter behaviour and modelling results on election night.
Antony continues to write about politics and elections on his own blog. This AMA is an opportunity to ask him what really happens before an election can be called, why some seats take longer to resolve, how preferences and redistributions shape the contest, and which election nights surprised him most. He also welcomes the kind of detailed electoral questions that rarely fit into a live television broadcast.
Craig Hill is a Brisbane-based author, journalist, teacher, business consultant and social justice campaigner. He is the General Manager of the Australian Book and Language Studio.
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