Teal Nicolette Boele has won the recount for the Sydney seat of Bradfield by just 27 votes.
The battle for the seat in Sydney’s north shore has been a rollercoaster ride with Boele at one stage looking like she had claimed it before Liberal candidate Gisele Kapterian then pulled ahead.
A recount was ordered with Boele beginning the painstaking process of checking the 112,000-odd ballots eight votes behind.
But she has now pulled ahead by 27, with Sky News chief election analyst Tom Connell calling the seat for the Climate200-backed independent.
Sussan Ley had named Kapterian as Shadow Minister for Technology and the Digital Economy in the recently-unveiled shadow cabinet.
But the Opposition Leader will need to find a replacement if Boele is officially declared the winner in the wealthy electorate stretching from North Turramurra and Wahroonga to Northbridge.
The ultra-tight battle is one of the closest in more than 100 years.
In 1919, the race for the seat of Ballarat was decided by just one vote, prompting a legal challenge and a subsequent by-election.
It is understood that the Liberal Party are mulling over a similar legal challenge given the razor-thin margin of victory.
It is the second attempt Boele has made for the seat, after running in 2022 and then styling herself as the Shadow Member for Bradfield over the last three years.
Kapterian stood for the Liberal Party after long-standing Liberal MP Paul Fletcher announced his retirement.
Neither candidates are yet to comment, as of 12.30pm on Wednesday.
The loss of Bradfield would leave the Liberal Party with no seats on Sydney’s north shore east of the Lane Cove River for the first time ever.
Bradfield was the seat of former Liberal Opposition leader Brendan Nelson.
Bradfield also overlaps with the state seats of former Liberal premiers Nick Greiner, Barry O’Farrell and Gladys Berejiklian.
Labor is now the only major party with a seat on Sydney’s north shore, with Jerome Laxale comfortably retaining Bennelong with 59.3 per cent of the two-party vote.
The Liberal Party kept just five seats in greater Sydney – Mitchell, Berowra, Cook, Lindsay and leadership contender Angus Taylor’s redrawn electorate of Hume.
It lost all its wealthy Sydney northern beaches seats at the 2022 election, along with Wentworth in the eastern suburbs.