In the first in a three-party election history series about Optional Preferential Voting called ‘Just Vote 1’, Ben explores the rise of preferential voting – how it happened, who supported and how political self-interest explains the change.
In the next two episodes, Ben will explore Labor’s push for first-past-the-post and optional preferential voting in the middle of the 20th century, and how the self-interest of the parties flipped in the 1990s to the point where it’s the Coalition that is now more likely to support OPV.
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Welcome to the Tally Room podcast, I’m Ben Raue.
This is the first of a three part series examining the history of preferential voting in Australia – in particular the debates about optional or compulsory preferential voting.
This is a story about how we vote, and why we vote that way. It’s a story of what political principles matter when designing an electoral system, but also about how those principles are often dictated by political self-interest.
It is a story over a century in the making, about how and why Australia adopted preferential voting, and the subsequent fight over exactly how these rules should work.
In Australia today, we have two main methods of election when a single representative is being chosen. Both methods require the voter to number their preferences, with a ‘1’ for their most preferred candidate. Under both methods, a vote can be passed on to lower preferences if their most preferred candidate is knocked out. But the difference is about whether voters need to number those other preferences or not.
Under ‘compulsory preferential voting’, or CPV, the most common method used for the House of Representatives and single-member elections in most states, the voter must number every box. There might be a few exceptions to deal with mistakes, but generally voters must clearly express a preference between every candidate. If they don’t do so, their vote is considered informal and is not counted.
Under ‘optional preferential voting’, or OPV, most prominently used to elect the New South Wales Legislative Assembly, voters don’t have to number any other boxes. If they don’t clearly indicate their preferred candidate, then the vote can’t be counted, but as long as there is a single clear ‘1’, the vote counts. If all of their preferred candidates are excluded, the vote ‘exhausts’, so not every formal vote will remain in the count until the end.
These two methods have existed for at least a century, and during that time there has been a constant tension over the method of voting. Early in the 20th century, those parties that tended to lose out from the flowing of preferences advocated for a return to ‘first past the post’, but this option was discredited by the 1970s.
Since then, the argument has focused on the exact method of marking preferences:
Do we force every voter to mark preferences for every candidate, which ensures stronger flows of preferences and a winner with a majority of the vote, but at the cost of more informal votes and denying a voter the choice to simply not mark a preference?
Or do we keep informal voting low and give voters the freedom to not mark preferences, even if it means candidates are elected with less than half the vote and preferences don’t flow as strongly?
Where a political party lands on this question often depends less on their political principles and more on what might help them. If your party does better on preferences from other candidates, or needs preferences to coordinate between multiple parties, you’ll likely support whatever method ensures preferences flow as strongly as possible: compulsory preferential, that is. But if your party is relatively united and doesn’t gain much preferences, you’ll likely support the method that minimises the flow of preferences – first past the post or optional preferential voting.
For most of the twentieth century, it was the parties of the right who benefited from preferences, while Labor usually experienced preferences as something that would flow against them and lose them elections.
This dichotomy then flowed into party positions on the electoral system: preferential voting was generally introduced by a conservative government, while Labor governments advocated for first-past-the-post or optional preferential voting. This split lasted as late as the 1980s – the Whitlam government attempted to introduce optional preferential voting for federal elections in the 1970s, and the Hawke government supported OPV in 1983.
But in more recent years, the positions have flipped. Preferences have favoured parties of the left, with Greens preferences being crucial for Labor election victories while the Coalition has been more unified. This led to the Queensland Labor government switching the state to CPV in 2016.
Yet in 2026, as another Queensland government considers switching back to OPV, it is no longer so easy to identify the winners and losers from preferential voting. With an increasingly fragmented party system, with One Nation threatening to win numerous seats, it now looks like preferential voting may favour one party in a particular context, but not in a different context.
For this podcast series, I’m going to explore the history of debates over preferential voting methods in Australia, looking at how arguments over political principles neatly aligned with the partisan self-interest of the day.
In the first years of Australian democracy, elections generally could be described as ‘first past the post’. You voted for as many candidates as there were to be elected, and whoever had the most votes won. There was no preferential voting, and certainly no attempt to make the result proportional. Some electorates were represented by a single member of Parliament, but multi-member electorates were common, particularly in the cities. Still, it was a simple matter of who comes first wins.
The first use of preferential voting for a parliamentary election in Australia came in colonial Queensland. The ‘contingent vote’ was passed in 1892, and first used in 1893.
This system was an optional preferential system in that voters weren’t required to preference every candidate. It worked a bit differently to our modern systems, but this wouldn’t have been noticeable for most voters.
The contingent vote was inspired by the second-ballot electoral systems that were commonplace at the time, and are still used today in countries like France. Voters first cast their votes for a wider range of candidates. If no-one wins a majority, the top two return for a second head-to-head election.
The contingent vote attempted to roll this all up into one election. First preferences were added up. Top two were identified, and then all other candidates’ preferences were allocated to one of those top two. While in our current system it is possible for a candidate in third place to occasionally win, that would have been impossible under the contingent vote.
Right from the very beginning, changes to the voting system were motivated by political self-interest, and anxiety about rising forces. A.A. Morrison, writing in 1960, said about the 1892 reforms:
“the Government found itself faced not only by an official Opposition whose policy differed from its own, but also by a growing Labor Party. It was accordingly fearful that in any election fought under the old system the splitting of votes between the two parties with similar views might present too many seats to Labor. Hence it introduced the contingent vote.”
No other colonies tried preferential voting before Federation, but the topic quickly came up in the first federal parliament.
The Barton government needed to pass an Electoral Act that would establish voting methods for Australia’s federal elections – the first federal election in 1901 had been conducted using the laws of each of the new states. The government’s Electoral Bill proposed preferential voting in single member electorates for the House of Representatives, and proportional representation for the Senate. In broad strokes, it looked a lot like the electoral systems we use today, but there were differences in the detail.
Optional preferential voting was proposed for the House of Representatives, but the bill ended up coming undone in the Senate, with opposition to the proportional system. When the bill returned to the House, there were concerns from Labour MPs about using a numbering system for one ballot while not using numbers for the other ballot. The government retreated, and first past the post was embedded as the electoral system for the House.
In the Senate, a ‘block vote’ system was introduced, where voters would vote for as many candidates as there were seats to fill, and the top-polling candidates would win.
The Protectionists would have likely benefited if preferential voting had been introduced in 1902. As the party sitting ideologically between Labour and the Free Traders, they would have likely benefited from preference flows anywhere that they made the top two. At the 1903 election, there were three seats where the Protectionist came a close second and could have won with preferences.
The 1903 federal election produced something close to a three-way tie, with 26 Protectionists, 24 Free Traders and 22 Labour members. If those three seats had flipped, the Protectionists would have been clearly the biggest party. Instead, the next three years were very unstable, with governments changing a number of times, and the Protectionists fell into third place in 1906.
Prior to that 1906 election, Protectionist leader Alfred Deakin made another attempt to introduce preferential voting – specifically CPV – in a pitch to Labor leader Chris Watson to isolate George Reid’s Free Traders:
“Have you thought of the exhaustive ballot – compulsory voting for every candidate. The lowest dropped out & his votes divided until someone gets a majority. With this our candidate & yours could not do each other anything like so much harm and one or others [sic] of us would win in several Reidite constituencies. Of course it must be compulsory voting for all candidates. It would be a great safety valve for both of us. What do you think?”
Labor was not interested, and a Deakin government bill on the matter lapsed at the 1906 election.
By 1909, the remnants of the Protectionists merged with the former Free Traders to form the fusion Liberal Party. For the next decade, Australian politics was very much a two-party affair.
Preferential voting began to spread through the Australian states over the next few years – and it was always non-Labour governments doing the legislating. Western Australia introduced optional preferential voting in 1907. Victoria introduced compulsory preferential voting in 1911, and WA made it compulsory the same year.
New South Wales actually experimented with a second ballot, which was introduced in 1910 by the Liberal government. At its first use, three seats required a second ballot, and in one seat, Labour voters swung in behind an independent who defeated the Liberal candidate who had come first on the original ballot.
Preferential voting returned to the federal agenda in the early 1910s. Joseph Cook became prime minister in 1913 and instituted a royal commission into the electoral system. Cook promised to implement preferential voting during the 1914 election, but ended up losing. That royal commission eventually recommended preferential voting for the House and proportional representation for the Senate, as in 1902.
There were constant pressures on the non-Labor side of politics as different candidates sought to run, but under first-past-the-post they largely were able to keep splitting candidates off the ballot: independent or minor party candidacies were rare, and it was very rare that a candidate was elected with less than half of the vote. In 1910 and 1913, only ten or eleven seats saw more than two candidates nominate. In 1914 and 1917, there were just three seats at each election which had three or more candidates.
At the 1917 election, it was very much a two-horse race – the Nationalists were a new party created by a merger of the Liberal Party and supporters of Billy Hughes who had split from Labor over the issue of conscription. Over 98% of votes were cast for either the Nationalists or Labor.
But in the following term, cracks began to form in the united anti-Labor front. Farmers groups in particular looked to run their own candidates independent of the Nationalists.
With farmers groups such as the Victorian Farmers’ Union looking to run candidates, we saw the familiar dance seen in first-past-the-post systems on many occasions: two distinct groups who both want to defeat their common enemy, but want something in return for withdrawing.
In early 1918, the national farmer’s organisation formally asked Billy Hughes to support preferential voting, but the prime minister left for Europe without a reply.
A by-election for the Victorian seat of Flinders was due to be held in May 1918, after Sir William Irvine was appointed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Victoria.
In addition to the Nationalist and Labor candidates, the Victorian Farmers Union nominated a candidate, John Hall. The acting prime minister William Watt tried to convince Hall not to stand by promising that he would introduce a bill on preferential voting, but the farmers insisted on a promise from the party overall.
The night before election day, Hall officially withdrew, thanks to the Nationalist government promising to introduce preferential voting.
The Nationalist candidate, future prime minister Stanley Bruce, ended up winning very comfortably, with 64% to 34% for Labor and 2% for the withdrawn farmers candidate, but the Farmers had achieved an important concession.
Western Australian founding father John Forrest died in early September, triggering a by-election for his seat of Swan. Preferential voting legislation was introduced in early October, but it was too late for that by-election.
The Western Australian Farmers and Settlers Association, who were affiliated with the Victorian Farmers Union, decided to stand a candidate alongside an independent and candidates for the Labor and Nationalist parties.
The vote ended up being split roughly three ways – Labor’s Edwin Corboy won with 34%, the farmers candidate polled 31.4%, while the Nationalist came third with 29.6%. It is highly likely that a preferential ballot would have seen Nationalist preferences elect the farmers candidate.
Just four days after the Swan by-election, and with a bill for preferential voting already introduced into parliament, Nationalist MP Chester Manifold died, triggering a by-election for his Victorian seat of Corangamite. There was now greater urgency to change the electoral system and allow the farmers candidates to run without splitting the vote.
The Electoral Bill of 1918 was a big one, that overhauled a large amount of Australia’s electoral system. But the introduction of preferential voting for the House of Representatives was one of the biggest items.
It proposed a system of compulsory preferential voting. The possibility of using OPV instead was not a major topic of the debate, although it did come up briefly.
In response to a question, the minister Paddy Glynn, clarified that “all preferences must be marked”. Labor MPs William Mahony and James Fenton objected, with Mahony calling it “scandalous”. Glynn defended the decision to use CPV by referring to its usage in Victoria and Western Australia.
Labor’s opposition to the reform focused on a number of other issues. They objected to making changes while soldiers were still overseas, with the First World War a few weeks away from an armistice. They also strongly objected to introducing a preferential system for the House while continuing to use the block vote for the Senate, whereby voters would tick or cross as many boxes as there are seats.
Eventually the government conceded the problems with not using preferential voting in the Senate, and in 1919 passed legislation switching the Senate to the preferential block vote – voters would number every box on both ballots, but the Senate results were not proportional – usually one side would win every seat in a state. Proportional representation would not arrive for another thirty years.
Some MPs supporting preferential voting made grand claims about how it would eliminate the need for party preselections, since multiple candidates could nominate, but they didn’t seem to consider that this would lead to much longer ballots and thus a more complex voting experience under CPV. In practice party preselections continued, although there were occasions of parties, in particular the Country Party and the pre-Second World War conservative parties in the cities, nominating multiple candidates for the same seat.
Labor members also raised concerns about making the voting system more complex, and potentially leading to more informal votes. John West, Labor member for East Sydney, said:
“Our electoral system should be so simple that people can readily understand what they have to do when they go into a polling booth every three years to record a vote.”
Some Labor members argued the move was pointless – since most seats only had two candidates, it would not change anything. This was missing the point, possibly intentionally – the two parties of the 1910s were already fracturing, despite efforts to minimise the field of candidates. Preferential voting would fuel that fragmentation, but it would also help manage it.
And of course, numerous Labor politicians made the charge of self-interest on the part of the government – with farmers candidates chipping away at the Nationalist vote, the government saw how the political system was changing.
But it’s likely the Nationalists understated the growth of what became the Country Party – rather than just polling a small share of the vote and those votes flowing back to the Nationalists, the farmers candidates often pushed the Nationalists into third place, and Nationalist preferences then flowed to them.
The farmers groups won eleven seats at the 1919 federal election, and the newly formed Country Party won fourteen seats in 1922, negotiating a coalition with the Nationalists which saw Billy Hughes replaced as prime minister.
In the early years of preferential voting, the parties did experiment with running multiple candidates. In 1919, the Nationalist Party ran a second candidate in four seats – three of them in Tasmania, where Hare-Clark had already established the principle of a party running multiple candidates and letting the voters sort it out.
In the first three decades of preferential voting, the two parties of the right regularly nominated multiple candidates: the Country Party nominated multiple candidates 27 times between 1922 and 1949, while the Nationalist and United Australia parties nominated multiple candidates 36 times. As the centre-right fragmented in the 1940s, preferential voting made it possible for different elements of the centre-right to run their own candidates and use preferential voting to avoid a Labor victory.
There were also regular cases of the two right-wing parties running candidates against each other, although the heights of 1919 and 1922 were rarely repeated. After the Nationalists and the Country Party formed their first coalition in 1922, the parties agreed to an electoral pact to not run candidates against each other’s sitting MPs.
While these cases did pop up, many seats remained straight contests between the major parties for a long time, and ballot papers were usually quite small. Two-candidate races were still very common.
While fragmentation was most common on the right, preferential voting was also helpful for Labor in managing the splits within the party in the 1930s and 1940s.
In 1940, Labor won four seats despite trailing on the primary vote – sometimes they benefited from preferences from Jack Lang’s breakaway Labor party, but Labor also sometimes benefited from conservative preferences to defeat their former party colleagues.
In 1943, Labor defeated independent Labor MP Maurice Blackburn on United Australia preferences, and defeated Jack Lang in Reid on preferences from the UAP and another breakaway Labor Party.
In the first half of the 20th century, it was usually the parties of the right who managed to come back and win thanks to preferences, but it wasn’t exclusively so, with Labor actually doing better on preferences in 1940.
While Labor did occasionally benefit from preferences, the party was still generally anti-preference.
New South Wales moved away from the second-ballot system at the 1920 state election. The government of William Holman – who like Billy Hughes an ex-Labor politician who had allied with the conservatives – legislated to use proportional representation for the Legislative Assembly. This system was used for three elections, but after the 1925 election the Labor government of Jack Lang moved to abolish the system.
The Lang government’s original intention was to revert to first-past-the-post, a system that hadn’t been used in a quarter-century, but the conservative Legislative Council amended his legislation and forced Lang to accept optional preferential voting.
The OPV system was used for one election in 1927 – the newly elected conservative government then moved to compulsory preferential voting, and that system was used in New South Wales for the next fifty years.
Further north in Queensland, the Labor government was shocked by the Cairns by-election of 1942, when conservative preferences elected an independent Labor candidate over the official party candidate. They also moved to restore first past the post, but had no upper house to get in the way.
In the 1940s, however, Labor’s reluctance to support preferential voting was not universal. Labor legislated for proportional representation in the Senate in 1948, and they required voters to number every box. Indeed a Liberal MP, Archie Cameron, proposed that voters should only need to number as many boxes as there are seats to fill, and this was rejected out of hand by the Attorney-General, HV Evatt, who expressed concern about votes exhausting when they could influence the result.
There was an uptick in informal voting for the Senate at the 1949 federal election under the new system. There was no change in the demands on the voter – they needed to number every box under the old and new system – but the informal rate climbed from 8% to 10.8%. Voters in South Australia needed to number up to 24 boxes, and 11.6% of voters cast an informal vote in that state.
Despite Evatt’s opposition prior to the election, Labor leader Ben Chifley proposed in 1950 that voters should only need to fill in some boxes, not all of them, for a formal vote to be counted.
Australian politics in the early 1950s found itself back in a similar position to the 1910s – Labor and the Coalition had emerged as two strong major blocs, with few votes cast for anyone else. The Labor breakaways of the 1930s and 1940s had faded away, and the Liberal Party had consolidated the urban conservatives.
In 1951, Labor and the Country Party each came from behind to win a single seat, but politics was mostly a two-horse race – there was only eight seats where preferences needed to be distributed. The Liberal and Country parties did not run against each other in any seats. There were only five seats where the ballot paper reached as far as a fourth candidate, with almost two thirds of seats being two-horse races.
Despite the emergence of the Country Party as a major force, politics seemed to have reverted to something as close as possible to a two-party system, and thus preferences played a much less significant role in deciding elections.
But it wouldn’t last, as the Labor Party was about to split.
That’s it for episode one of “Just Vote 1”.
I’ll be back next week to explore the Labor Party split of the 1950s, how DLP preferences fueled the long era of Coalition government, and the Labor Party’s reaction against preferential voting, which led to the Whitlam government’s attempt to introduce OPV in 1974. But already in 1974 there was the beginnings of a shift, as preferences stopped flowing as strongly to the Coalition, and growth of progressive candidates on the left meant that preferences started to be quite handy to the Labor Party.
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