WA’s upper house counting in the dark

By
Ben Raue
-
39

We have a lot of information about how the count is going for the Legislative Assembly in Western Australia – there’s a few close races, and places where we’re waiting for full distributions of preferences, but the information is reasonably clear.

Unfortunately there’s a lot less useful data for the Legislative Council, and there’s bunch of ways in which the data reporting is falling short of what we’ve got in other states using similar electoral systems.

For this I’m going to explain the data that is missing, why that makes it harder to track the count, and I’ve also put together a map showing the vote share for the six highest-polling parties (at least for the vote categories where we can identify the seat).

When New South Wales counts Legislative Council ballots, they do two successive rounds of counting. The first round totals up the number of above the line votes for each group, as well as the total number of votes that are either informal or below the line. This is pretty similar to the first count being conducted for the WA Legislative Council. So far, so good.

Unfortunately, when you look at the vote breakdowns for that upper house count, there’s something odd going on. Firstly, the WAEC is not publishing breakdowns below the statewide totals on their public website. I have managed to gather the information from the media feed. But when you look at this data, there is no mention of electorate.

For results at each booth, it is possible to identify the electorate that the booth is contained within. It’s even possible in the case of dual booths to see two different sets of data, and if you sort them by the number of votes cast you can work out which seat each half of the booth is part of.

But for special votes – mobile polling, postal votes, absent votes and any other declaration votes – there is no seat breakdowns at all. It’s just one big total for each category cast anywhere in the state.

Unfortunately those vote categories are going to be reported at an inconsistent rate. It would be really useful to know which seats have finished counting, and which ones still have more to come, which would help us understand how the total vote shares are likely to change as the remaining votes are added. But we can’t do that.

I asked the WAEC media team about this and was told:

The publishing of Legislative Council votes has changed due to a legislative amendment. Votes are now counted as Whole of State, not by Region, so separating votes by region is no longer possible. 

While it is true that the regions are no longer around, the districts (or electorates) do exist. All ballot papers are cast in a particular electorate. It shouldn’t be impossible to disaggregate voting figures by seat.

It’s also important for transparency, because it allows us to analyse patterns and find mistakes. It’s much harder to tell if one batch of votes has been transposed between the wrong groups if it is lumped in a much larger pile of votes.

Then we get to the second count, where ballot papers will need to be data entered. At the end of the process we will have below-the-line figures for each candidate.

When New South Wales does this second count, they publish daily updates of total figures for the second count, including below the line votes, and with reports on which batches of votes have been entered. This then allows you to compare like-with-like between the first and second count to identify the impact of below-the-line votes on the count. Other jurisdictions do other things – the ACT even conducts a daily interim distribution of preferences with all of the digitised results produced so far!

We will not get any of that for WA. The WAEC has said:

Until the result is declared only results by above-the-line parties and groups will be available on the website.

So there really isn’t too much to do for the Legislative Council. Special votes will continue to be added to the upper house count, but until they have all been added we won’t know what bias there is between different parts of the state. And we won’t know anything about the role of below-the-line votes until this count is over.

So all of that is unfortunate, and I wanted to explain the things that will be hindering election analysts.

I’m working on another blog post for tomorrow explaining all of the issues with the conduct of this election that demonstrate the need for better processes to review WA state elections, so I’ll come back to this topic then.

In the meantime, I’m going to publish the one bit of interesting analysis looking at upper house votes by district. I won’t try and calculate a swing, because these numbers include no postal, absent or other declaration votes. But they have some interesting patterns, most of which are not unexpected.

You can toggle between maps for the Labor, Liberal, Nationals, Greens, One Nation and Legalise Cannabis parties.

Of course Labor’s vote is highest across the metro area, while the Greens have particular peaks in some inner city seats and the south-west. The Nationals of course did best in regional areas, although did surprisingly well in Bateman and South Perth. The Liberal vote peaked in metro seats close to the Indian Ocean.

One Nation did better in regional areas, but unlike the Nationals they also did well in outer suburban seats. And Legalise Cannabis generally did better in the outer suburbs and some regional seats, doing particularly well in Kalgoorlie.

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39 COMMENTS

  1. Thanks Ben, useful information in the absence of WAEC providing a seat-by-seat breakdown on its website. Another shameful failure of a once-excellent electoral commission. What an insult to parrot “this is now whole of state” as an excuse for aggregating all declaration votes.
    Often it’s the losers of an election who complain about the conduct of an election. Now the winners are equally angry.

  2. id say the last upper house spot will go to One Nation or Independents (group M) maybe animal justice. the shooters based on prefrences Liberatarisn will probably push Shooters up. sustainable australia havent recommended preferences and ajp has only preferenced other parties that would be excluded before it. i cant sem to find a website for Stop Pedophiles Protect Kiddies so not sure what would happen to their preferences but depending on where they go Shooters or Onp in my opinion would likely get each other depending on who finishes above who.

  4. @John, the SFFPWA have done so badly (probably thanks to their name) on first preferences that they’re going to need a very good flow to leap frog those in front of them. Not ruling it out, just saying that it’s a big hurdle they’ve made for themselves.

  5. The WAEC have been manifestly unhelpful and, frankly, treated those asking questions like children in their responses. Very unimpressive.

  6. This WA Election was incredibly poorly run. The Early Voting Centres were we lived were the worst possible locations they could choose. One was in a half built building that wasn’t even on the map yet, the other was in a location that was super busy, limited parking and very difficult to access.

    I have heard a lot of people saying the person issuing the ballot gave them an incorrect information about the upper house voting. Lots of people including myself were that you only need to put 1 above the line for your vote to count, which is incorrect. I wonder if that was left from the training of previous elections.

    The voting booths weren’t adequately staffed, many had to work 16+ hours without a break and there were huge lines outside booths. The booth that I was at usually reports within 45 minutes, but this time around the first preference count wasn’t finished until 8.30pm. And then the poor booth workers had to stay back and count the upper house ballots.

  7. Usually major parties get a better vote in the lower house, due to their voters finding a smaller party in the upper house, but in Fremantle that’s flipped. The Greens did 15.4% better in the upper house and Labor 3.6% better, so it’s obvious where Kate Hulett’s vote came from.

    The Shooters really didn’t have their eye on the ball this election. Based on statewide results they would definitely have won a seat in 2017, and probably in 2013 and 2021, so they could definitely have done a lot better. Their website is a joke – the front page has a bunch of press releases from back when Rick Mazza was in parliament, and even the section titled “Election 2025” was just a few Facebook links and a scroll wheel-exhausting list of HTV cards.

  8. P57: yes indeed. I voted at about 3pm, usually a fairly quiet time, and there was a line of about 100 people that took ages to get through. Not even a hint of democracy sausages, as they’d sold out and packed up by lunchtime, and the few people handing out ballots were complaining about that as they hadn’t had lunch yet (8 hrs without a feed, ouch). Then when leaving the booth, there was two boxes – one marked “large ballot paper” (upper house), the other one not marked at all. Usually that’d be something like “Legislative Assembly – green ballot paper” in official font. I had to stop and make sure I was putting them in the right boxes. Amateur stuff.

    Apparently election work has been contracted out to a labour hire company until 2029… the WAEC might want to get out of that contract early. Link here:

    https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-12/shane-love-persol-kelly-wa-election-2025-recruitment-company/105042324

    (With side amusement that Shane Love is still named as the opposition leader.)

  9. @Bird of Paradox, the Western Australian is reporting the same labour hire firm who run the State Election has been contracted by the AEC to run the Federal Elections in Western Australia.

  10. “Lots of people including myself were that you only need to put 1 above the line for your vote to count, which is incorrect. ” (patreon_57 above)

    Actually that is correct – however it would then only count for one party and thereafter exhaust. The instructions are different to Senate (where you can actually also just vote 1 ATL if you want to, but only because of a savings provision).

  11. Hi Kevin,

    Maybe I didn’t word it correctly, but that’s what I meant. People were told to just put 1 above the line. I know that is still a formal vote will obviously exhaust if doesn’t elect a candidate.

  12. You would think that after the experience of the AEC having to rerun the entire Senate election in WA, the WAEC would be particularly concerned about the possibility of upper house mistakes.

    Yet this refusal to provide granular data amplifies the risks. Without analysts and parties having the opportunity to notice something is very wrong at a particular booth (eg the swapping of the vote for a major and minor party, as happens sometimes) there’s a much greater chance of an error going undetected.

  13. @patreon_57 – 100% agreed. My ‘favourite’ example is Kalamunda, where they didn’t have a designated EPP (they could have used Kalamunda Performing Arts Centre which the federal election used), so anyone who wanted to vote early had to do it at either Guildford (Midland EPP) or elsewhere. It means all of them are casted as absent votes, and will take longer to be counted.

    Additionally, the EPPs for Murray-Wellington (Leschenault Aquatic Centre) and Collie-Preston (Collie Club) were located away from where a good chunk of the electorate’s population live. People in Eaton would prefer to vote at the Bunbury EPP rather than the Collie EPP, same with voters in Pinjarra who would prefer to vote at the Mandurah EPP rather than the Australind EPP.

    They should look more at where the majority of the population live, and while they can certainly keep these poorly-located EPPs, they should look at add multiple EPPs in certain electorates, like Collie-Preston, Murray-Wellington, Warren-Blackwood, so that people who live far away and would prefer/need to vote early don’t need to travel a long distance for it. It’s a basic necessity and people have reason why they don’t want to travel an hour or two just to vote early. Yes postal voting exists, but it can take a lot longer to get the mailed ballot and for it to be mailed to the WAEC.

    (note: EPP = Early Polling Place, what the WAEC refers to early voting locations)

  14. Correction: Kalamunda Agricultural Hall was the Kalamunda PPVC. Don’t know where I got Kalamunda Performing Arts Centre from.

  16. @north yes but thhe liberatarians who will be elimated first will boost them up to around the same eel as animal justice and depending on where stop pedos vote goes (i cant find a site or anything to show where they directed preferences) though i assume that might go the the sff and sff will likely fget preferences from one nation as well so id say they would be in the box seat

  18. https://www.watoday.com.au/politics/western-australia/company-rubbishes-wa-election-outsourcing-claim-as-aec-distances-itself-from-recruitment-model-20250313-p5ljaq.htm

    PersolKelly has also been hired among a number of other recruitment agencies to help obtain staff for the upcoming federal election.

    An Australian Electoral Commission spokesman said WAEC seemed to employ a different recruitment model.

    “The AEC cannot speak to the apparent direct sourcing of staff through a single recruitment provider that the WAEC is being reported to have done,” he said.

    “If that is the case, the AEC model is very different to that. The AEC is an entirely separate organisation running a different electoral event and I don’t have the full details of how the WAEC has approached it.”

    He said recruitment agencies only targeted specific areas in the election and the commission conducted the majority of its own recruitment directly.

    “A large part is our direct outreach to previous staff, AEC communication with different community groups and AEC advertising,” he said.

    “People register their interest with the AEC, via an AEC system which is then managed by permanent AEC staff.

    “We also use recruitment companies at times and have done for many elections – this can be particularly helpful in areas that are harder to secure staff than others.

    “Any categorisation of the small component of the AEC’s recruitment task utilising recruitment agencies as being the outsourcing of the management of polling booths would be incorrect.”

    In WA, the AEC has a $38,000 contract with PersolKelly and $37,000 contract with Randstad for the next federal election.

  19. **In WA, the AEC has a $38,000 contract with PersolKelly and $37,000 contract with Randstad for the next federal election.**
    Gotta wonder how that works? Are the Labour Hire staff paid for attending the seminar? What’s the procedure if more casuals are needed at a booth than was allowed for? Get the DRO on the blower to get the okay, then call the Labour Hire to send someone out for the 4 hour minimum?
    Just an observation:
    Since the Unions control Labour Hire placement [only Union approved labour will be sent to Union jobsites, could this be a back door way to ensure all casuals are at least sympathetic and onside with Labor?

  20. Paranoid, swivel-eyed nonsense. Casual workers on the list of a labour hire company are very unlikely to be unionised – if they’re not working in the same industry (let alone the same workplace) from one week to the next, they’re almost impossible to sign up. Even if they were, suggesting that makes them more likely to rig elections for Labor puts you deep into conspiracy theory territory.

  22. I was also told to “just number one above the line, or twenty below” not a huge deal, it’s still a formal vote and unlikely to exhaust but I really wish polling staff would stick to the script especially when it’s a new syatem

  23. Is there a link (or a picture) to the WA LC ballot somewhere that shows its not just “Number 1 ATL”? Navigating the WAEC website is a chore.

  28. Thanks. Still I think shooters might be in the best position. But I think it will be a centre right seat either way. Still labor and the greens have more than enough seats to not need anyone else. Either that or labor will need 3 crossbenchers

  29. Shooters aren’t realistically in the contest. Labor will have 16, Greens 4, 2 Nats, 1 each of One Nation, Christians, Legalise Cannabis. Liberals should be able to get an 11th seat. That leaves the last seat to be decided between Group M, Animal Justice, a second One Nation or an outside chance of Sustainable Australia.

  30. Add a shooters were prefernces by liberatarians boosting their numbers and shooters and also by onp. Sustainable Australia no chance

  31. Liberatarians will probably be eliminated first. Propping up the shooters to at least the same level as animal justice. Protect kiddies will spray and then onp will push shooters into poll position. Sustainable Australia will then spray labor will probably get their 16th off this spray. Ajp will probably mostly exhaust. This will leave 3 spots for 2 of the shooters libs and Ind in my opinion. I think the shooters will get one and the last will come down to libs and Ind who should benefit from Nats. So Ind to miss out.

  33. I doubt there is any point in paying attention to what small parties put on their how to vote cards. Very few voters would’ve seen them. For “Stop Pedophiles” their whole strategy is people voting for them based on their party name. Those people aren’t following a how to vote.

  34. Weird party tbh. Hugh Dolan appears to be a former Jackie Lambie candidate for Victoria’s upper house, and tried to form the current party in WA as ‘DLP’ but got protested by Labor and clearly no relation to the real DLP. So changed name to the ‘Protect Kiddies’ party name they have now. With no web presence do wonder how the party was able to form and what they get out of this (I assume money)?

  35. Oh, it gets weirder. Dolan ran in the 2016 federal election for JLN (Vic, senate), then the 2022 Vic election for the DLP (NE Metro) – he can’t have been in WA for long.

    Interesting Reddit thread here (scroll down a bit for the good stuff):

    https://old.reddit.com/r/perth/comments/1j3o8vx/i_think_i_have_found_the_most_unhinged_how_to/

    Seems like Kobryn-Coletti and Wilson (ticket-stuffers on the SPPK list) are extremist right headcases who used to work for Fraser Anning. No wonder they tried to hide their names. Half of these people are probably on an ASIO watchlist, and the money behind them would come from dark places. (This is starting to remind me of the ANM firebombings in the late 80s.)

    Oh, and they don’t like goats.

  36. Wow, thanks for that link, Bird. Truly unhinged. Links to Fraser Anning explains a lot.

    Practically for the LC count, I imagine any preference flow from their votes to scatter everywhere.

  37. atm im gonna change my forecast to SFF gaining a seat and the last seat being a tossup between the libs and IND (group m) with maybe AJP and outside chance

  38. The Election day was a mess, but everything since then has been worse for the WAEC. Two weeks since the Election, the upper house count is only up to 67% with no indication of what’s added to the count and no time stamp for updates.

    No results per electorate or polling place results for the upper house. In the lower house there are seats awaiting declaration but still no tpp data available on the WAEC website

  39. They are not planning to ever publish LC results by electorate. The media feed does contain results by booth but for special votes like postals and absents it’s one big total for the whole state.

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