Incumbent Bob Hawke won promisingly enough, but it seemed he was facing a separate kind of electoral battle to Andrew Peacock's Coalition: informal votes.

A large number of informal votes took "the icing off the ALP cake". About half a million voters were estimated to have improperly marked their ballot.

"The high informal vote could have been crucial for Labor in marginal seats which could have been won if the votes had been valid," Jack Waterford and Debbie Cameron wrote.

"Labor Party scrutineers said that 85 per cent of the informal vote would have gone to the government."

Political correspondent Paul Malone wrote some influential sources from the Labor Party blamed the Australian Electoral Commission for informal votes.

"They said the commission had spent $2 million telling people to vote in only one square for the Senate without saying they had to vote in all squares for the House of Representatives,"

Iced or not, Hawke got his cake, and ate it too, with early analysis predicting he'd have a 20-seat majority.

See: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/page/13748986