The Tally Room

The trend of voters choosing to cast their votes has been progressing for a long time, but there was a major shift in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic moved a lot more voters away from casting their votes on election day. The 2020 Queensland council...

Tasmania's lower house will be expanding in size from 25 to 35 at the upcoming election. Usually when we analyse election results, a key tool is to compare the results to the last election. Swings, or changes in seat count. But with a big increase...

Yesterday I was informed of a website from Tasmanian Labor that has been used in text messages to Tasmanian voters. I don't normally comment on campaign rhetoric like this, but in this case the website name-drops me a number of times, and selectively quotes from...

Ben is joined by Alexis Pink from community radio station 4ZZZ and Andrew Messenger from the Guardian Australia to discuss the upcoming council elections across Queensland and the two state by-elections to be held on the same day. We discuss the Brisbane City Council campaign...

Tasmanian state elections often play out across a north-south divide, with the two southern electorates playing out differently than the northern remainder of the state. In this post I thought I would try and map out some of these dynamics over the last 35 years...

In cases where members are elected to represent single-member wards, or divisions, Queensland councils use the optional preferential voting (OPV) electoral system to elect members. This covers all mayoral elections, as well as council seats in most urban south-east Queensland councils. Under OPV, voters are...

Brisbane City's single-member wards lend themselves to two-party competition, but in recent decades we've seen the rise of the Greens, first by just contesting wards that had previously been two-candidate contests, and eventually by winning their first ward and increasing their vote citywide. This post...

I've been thinking for a while of publishing a regular newsletter which would have a bit of a different style to my usual blog posts, where I can discuss topics I've found interesting recently. For the last month I've started publishing such a newsletter via...

11:12 - Alright I think that's it for tonight. I won't be putting up another blog post analysing these results, but I'm going to be looking into the way the by-election has been spun in my Patreon newsletter on Monday. If you want to read...

Nominations were announced today for the Tasmanian state election, as well as the Dunstan by-election in South Australia. I will get the full candidate lists up later tonight, but for now I wanted to dwell on some overall numbers showing how much bigger the ballot...