Casting a formal vote in a Tasmanian lower house election isn’t the easiest vote to cast, but in some ways it’s easier than it would be in other places.
Voters are required to number at least as many boxes as there are vacancies – that means that the required number of preferences increased from 5 in 2021 to 7 in 2024 – despite an attempt by Kevin Bonham to allow for savings provisions that would minimise informal rates.
That shift caused an unsurprising increase in informal voting in 2024. In 2025, the overall informal rate has dropped slightly, but there is some interesting variation between the five divisions.
The informal rate has dropped slightly in 2025, but it’s still one of the highest on record. Of course it is higher than any election in the 5-seat era, but there was only one election in the previous 7-seat era which had a higher informal rate – 5.9% in 1986.
Next up, I’ve tried to compare the number of candidates in each division to the informal rate, back to 1989. But it’s worth understanding the dynamics of what a voter needs to do for their vote to be formal, and how many candidates parties run.
The big parties – Labor, Liberal and Greens – run a full ticket of seven candidates in each electorate. This allows a voter to cast a formal vote without leaving their ticket, voting 1 to 7. But the formality rules also ensures that a voter who wants to keep things simple can’t just number some of the party’s candidates. If voters could vote 1 to 5, there’d be a lot more exhaustion while the party still has candidates in the race.
In contrast, most of the smaller parties or independents only ran one or a handful of candidates. Peter George was the main exception by running a full ticket. The other prominent independents usually ran just on their own.
So the increase in the number of vacancies in each division understandably increases the number of candidates, but it is not much more challenging if you want to vote for one of the bigger parties.
If you want to vote for an independent running on their own, however, the increase from five to seven likely has more impact. And the bigger ballot still adds more complexity to the process.
There’s some relationship between candidate numbers and informality, but it may be confounded by candidate numbers increasing with the increased magnitude. For 2025, there was a tendency for divisions with bigger ballot papers to have higher informal rates, but not exclusively.
The other thing that stood out was that the two southern electorates had a noticeably lower informal rate than Bass, Braddon and Lyons.
This chart shows the informal rate trend by division, and a noticeable separation has opened up between north and south. While those two have generally had lower informal rates in the past, the gap has become much clearer in the last two elections. I suspect there’s some demographic explanations here.
There clearly wasn’t any time in the last parliament to consider electoral reform, but I do think the parliament should consider a savings provision. In the ACT, voters are instructed to number as many boxes as there are vacancies (5 in the ACT, 7 in Tasmania), but a single 1 is sufficient for a formal vote. Tasmania should follow that lead.
need to complete the graphs with a scale.. rookie error
Ben: how does the ballot paper present in Tasmanian Legislative Assembly ie House of Reps style (with only one column) or senate style (with several columns)?
Don, you could be a bit more descriptive with your comments instead of hurling insults. I assume you are referring to the shapes of the scatterplot. Datawrapper sadly does not offer that as an option in the legend but I explained what they were in the notes.
Roger, they have multiple columns. One for each party or independent group.