![Brendan Moylan has just over 66 per cent of the votes in his favour in the Northern Tablelands by election as of 7.30pm on Saturday, June 22. Brendan Moylan has just over 66 per cent of the votes in his favour in the Northern Tablelands by election as of 7.30pm on Saturday, June 22.](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/Xn3KP2xbyFBWgTmsCMnW6P/e97d1225-3775-4262-8300-5d57290c631f.jpg/r0_116_2376_1452_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
Sunday Morning
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The Nationals candidate for the Northern Tablelands by election Brendan Moylan will be the Member Elect for the seat.
About half the total count was completed on Saturday night with more than 26,000 votes tallied of just more than 59,000 electors.
Of those Mr Moylan now holds more than 17,300, which lifted his first preference vote total to a staggering 68 per cent share of the count so far.
The Shooters, Fishers and Farmers party candidate Ben Smith enjoyed some popularity, holding a bit over 3000 votes before counting resumed on Sunday morning.
Greens contender Dr Dorothy Robinson was third in the running with about 2400 votes on Sunday.
Saturday night
Nationals candidate for the seat of the Northern Tablelands Brendan Moylan is likely to be a shoe-in to replace outgoing Nats MP Adam Marshall.
Official counting began at 6pm on Saturday, June 22 with Moylan dominating the results early in the counting process.
By 8pm about one third of the electorate's votes had been counted with just shy of 20,000 ballots tallied.
More than 12,300 of those favoured Mr Moylan giving him a 65 per cent haul of the first preference votes counted.
The nearest contenders were Shooters, Fishers and Farmers party candidate Ben Smith with almost 2600 votes and Greens contender Dr Dorothy Robinson with about 2100 votes.
There are almost 60,000 electors in the seat and almost 40,000 ballots are still to be counted, but early indications give Mr Moylan a clear cut victory.
EARLIER:
By 7.30pm only around 15 per cent of the total votes had been tabulated, but Mr Moylan was already building a strong lead securing around more than 8000 votes from the first 12,000 ballots counted.
Should that trend continued through the night it would give Mr Moylan a dominant win and a 66 per cent first preferences vote victory, which falls just shy of Adam Marshall's last win where he was the most popular candidate in all of NSW.
At the time of writing there were still about 45,000 votes to count, but the early indications put Mr Moylan on a winning trajectory with an official result possible later on Saturday night.