The South Australian Legislative Council has a certain simplicity that means it hasn’t been the focus of much analysis.
With just eleven members elected by proportional representation on a statewide vote, most seats were decided quickly just based on primary votes, leaving 1-2 seats in any doubt. At this point the result is clear for all but one seat, with Labor favourites for that seat.
For this blog post I’m going to examine what could happen with the remaining votes to be counted, and with flows of preferences.
Ten seats have definitively been decided: four Labor, three One Nation, two Liberal and one Greens. Nine of these seats are based on the party polling a full quota. One Nation is on 2.92 quotas so we can be confident they will win a third seat.
Labor has a decent lead for the eleventh seat. The remaining quotas for the leading candidates are as follows:
- Labor – 0.44
- Legalise Cannabis – 0.29
- Family First – 0.25
- Greens – 0.22
- Animal Justice – 0.16
- Liberal – 0.12
- Real Change – 0.12
- Others – 0.46
So what changes between now and the final declaration of the result? Two extra pieces of information will be added. Firstly, there are still some primary votes yet to be tallied. Secondly, preferences will be distributed. I’ll deal with those one at a time.
Unfortunately we are dealing with a severe shortage of data when it comes to which votes have been counted, and which ones haven’t, and it’s hard to compare like-with-like compared to the last election.
It is difficult to know precisely which votes have been counted. The ECSA website reports that nearly all election day and pre-poll booths have been counted, and I suspect the missing booths are those that were not actually used (based on examining lower house data). But there is little data on the other vote categories which are currently being counted in the lower house counts, and presumably are in the process of being added in the upper house. About 1.13 million votes were cast in 2022, and about 980,000 votes have been cast this time.
In theory, we could compare the votes cast in 2022 in categories that have been counted, with those yet to be counted. Unfortunately we lack detailed data on which votes have been counted, and ECSA has changed the voting categories enough to make such a comparison impossible anyway. In the 2022 booth results, there is a single ‘declaration votes’ to cover all votes other than ordinary election-day votes including pre-poll and postal votes. That vote category was slightly worse for Labor, significantly worse for the Greens, about the same for One Nation and significantly better for the Liberal Party. But many of those have been counted already this time. Now that ECSA is publishing results in more detail, this task could be easier in 2030 with greater transparency.
So what about preferences? How would we expect them to flow?
This is just the third election in South Australia since the state abolished group voting tickets prior to the 2018 election. This effectively produced a new electoral system and you can’t really compare results before and after the reforms.
In 2018, 60.4% of voters just voted ‘1’ above the line’, while 33.4% numbered multiple preferences above the line and 6.2% voted below the line. In 2022, 62.6% voted just ‘1’ above, 31.3% numbered preferences above the line, and 6.1% voted below the line.
In comparison, New South Wales uses a similar electoral system, and rates of voters just voting ‘1’ above the line was over 80% in 2011 and 2015, but has since dropped to about 60%, in line with South Australia.
So there’s a lot of voters not doing much with their preferences. In theory, we could see rates of preferencing increasing, but South Australia was already in line with New South Wales in 2022.
This new electoral system is yet to produce a result in South Australia where preferences have mattered – in both 2018 and 2022, the candidates leading on primary votes were all elected. Of course, this doesn’t mean that preferences can’t matter, but they tend to play a smaller role in such a high-magnitude election when so many voters opt out of marking preferences.
I have calculated the position of each candidate during the final rounds of the count in 2018 and 2022. ECSA actually reports thousands of counts, showing every batch of votes that are moved, but I have simplified these counts to just show rounds when the distribution of one candidate’s preferences is finalised. For these graphs I show the numbers for the last seven candidates running for the last two seats. I show the round when there is one candidate left for each group, and the counts when just those seven candidates remain.
In 2018, the Liberal and Greens candidates started well in front of the other candidates – the Greens were 0.256 ahead of Labor when each group was still in the race.
The Greens tended to gain the highest rate of preferences. Between count 31 and count 40, the Greens gained 0.191 quotas, Labor gained 0.115, the Liberal gained 0.117 and the Christians gained 0.066.
The contest was much closer in 2022. At the point where there was one candidate left per group, the gap between One Nation (on track for the tenth seat) and the Liberal Democrats (in twelfth place) was just 0.111 quotas. Notably the Greens were not in the hunt in 2022 -the party had gained a swing which put them just over a quota, so the second Greens candidate had a small number of votes to distribute.
Between counts 26 and 35, Labor again gained the largest share of preferences, of 0.087 quotas, with Family First gaining 0.058 and SA Best gaining 0.062.
By the final count, One Nation had gained 0.127, Labor 0.202 and Family First 0.160.
One thing that is consistent here is Labor does relatively well out of preferences, but not as well as the Greens.
So let’s go back to the parties competing for the last seat in 2026. Labor has a big lead, with Legalise Cannabis their closest rival, followed by Family First and the Greens.
I think it is very likely that Labor has too much of a lead to be caught up. I think Legalise Cannabis may do relatively well out of preferences, but it’s a big gap to close. I can’t see the Greens or Family First catching up.
