The blogosphere has played a key role in shaping how this campaign has been perceived, particularly in terms of shining a clear light on poll results and trends. Its next challenge is how it covers election night itself. My hope is that it can offer some serious analysis to help inform the mainstream media's coverage, both on the night and the morning after.

The key election night challenge from our perspective, of course, is how the Greens vote is interpreted as it starts to come in. This has been a problem for us in recent elections, as our vote has a strong tendency to look somewhat suppressed on election night and climb over the following days. Consequently, we often see morning after commentary saying we've bombed, when, in fact, final results will show yet another improvement in our results.

There are two basic reasons for this trend.

The first factor is that Senate numbers are a very small part of the election night coverage, obviously, and they only start dribbling in towards the end of the night. On top of that, the tendency is to start reporting Senate numbers from small and outlying booths where the Greens don't traditionally poll so well.

The second, much larger, reason is that the Greens do disproportionately well in absentee, provisional and pre-poll votes which are all counted after election night. Our demographic is obviously skewed to young people and reasonably well-off empty-nesters who tend to travel more and therefore cast votes ahead of election day.

For those who like detail, check out the AEC's data from the last election by vote type. The numbers show the total Greens vote at just under 7%, but almost 11% of absent, almost 10% of provisional and almost 8% of pre-poll. Given that these three account for just under 12% of all votes cast, and they are all counted after election night, you can see why it stands to reason that the Greens vote might seem lower than expected at first, but climbs steadily as the count moves on.

[As an aside, if you're wondering about the postal vote figure, which is lower than total for pretty much everyone except the coalition, that's because the Libs and Nats have a long-standing tradition of throwing heaps of resources at getting out the postal vote. No-one else does so. Maybe we should next time?]

Of course, there's the additional factor that, because of complicated and somewhat unpredictable preference flows, the Senate is often not decided until a fortnight or so after the election. So, regardless of the vote itself, we may not know for a long time how many Senators we'll be coming back with.

For further reading, check out Paul Norton's great post discussing this at Larvatus Prodeo after the 2006 Victorian State election. Worth a read.

So, I guess my hope is that, just as the psepho-blogosphere has contributed tremendously to the more sophisticated reading of polls at this election than has previously been the case, it can similarly help, through the night, in countering the trend to downplay the Greens result by pointing out this important fact.

Diary note: I'll be live-blogging the election result from the Tally Room on Saturday night. One of many live-blogs, I'm sure.

Please do come along here and take part in the discussions on the night. If you've got any particular news to pass on, definitely use the comments threads to do so!