Monday, 4 July
The Australian Electoral Commission will receive absentee ballots which have been sent back to their local electorate. Postal and other declaration votes are checked against the roll before being included in the count.
Counting of Senate pre-poll ordinary votes and any remaining House of Representatives ordinary pre-poll votes not already counted on Saturday night is under way.
Bill Shorten is off to western Sydney to thank voters and will do a street walk in Penrith. Shorten is having a leadership group meeting, which he does every day, but I’m sure they’ll have plenty to talk about.
Malcolm Turnbull is in Sydney. The Coalition and the Greens leaders have no public events planned.
Tuesday, 5 July
Prepoll and declaration (such as absent) votes are included in the count from Tuesday.
These votes may tip the balance as they can flow in different proportions than the large number of ordinary votes already counted. It’s most likely any change of lead in the remaining in-doubt seats or a seat moving out of the undecided column will happen after this count.
Turnbull has said postal votes will deliver the Coalition a number of in-doubt seats so it can form majority government.
On Guardian Australia’s figures Labor and the Coalition are on 64 seats each, with 17 in doubt. The Coalition has an outside chance in Flynn and Melbourne Ports, where Labor is in the lead.
The ABC election tracker has the Coalition on 68 seats, Labor on 67, with independents and minor parties on five and 10 seats in doubt.
Of those 10 in-doubt contests, Labor leads in five, the Coalition in four and the Nick Xenophon team in Grey. To get to a majority (76 seats) on those figures, prepoll, declaration and postal votes would have to help the Coalition keep its lead in four seats and overturn leads in another four contests.
Wednesday, 6 July, and onwards
The remainder of the postal votes will continue to trickle in. The AEC distributed 1.5m postal votes, and so far about 1.1m have been returned so this means a further injection of 400,000 votes.
In extremely close contests, these could still swing the result.
The Australian electoral commissioner, Tom Rogers, has said some seats will become clear within days of the count resuming on Tuesday, but others will take longer.
Negotiations for confidence and supply or any formal deals can occur in this time but will depend on the number of seats that remain in doubt.
Friday, 15 July
The AEC must wait 13 days from the election for the final postal votes to come in. That deadline is at 6pm, at which point every vote from every contest is in. However, unless one or more seats are exceptionally close, the number of seats for each side will already be known.
After Friday, the AEC can determine which senators have been elected, because at this point it will know the total number of formal votes and how many are needed for a quota. Preference distribution is conducted electronically for the Senate election.
Monday, 8 August
Writs are returned, which is the formal process recording who has won a contest.
Before the election, Malcolm Turnbull had said parliament would resume in August, but the likelihood of a hung parliament has thrown this into doubt.
