The Tally Room

Referendum results are made up of building blocks of states - four states are required to pass a referendum. While a successful referendum also requires a majority nationwide, that has never been the deciding factor. It's always been about the four states. In this post...

One of the most interesting elements of a constitutional referendum in Australia is that there are two requirements for the referendum to be carried: it needs a majority of votes nationally, but it also needs a majority in a majority of states. Since there have...

Over the next two weeks I'll be writing a few blog posts based on the referendum results data in my data repository - looking at the history of referendums throughout the 20th century. The Voice referendum will be the first constitutional referendum held since 1999...

Federal redistributions have recently commenced in New South Wales, Victoria and Western Australia. The AEC yesterday published the enrolment data to be used to draw New South Wales federal electorates. There are two sets of data - enrolment data as of August 2023, and projected enrolments...

Victorian premier Daniel Andrews will be stepping down today as premier and as Member for Mulgrave, a seat he has held since 2002. This means a by-election will be held for that seat soon, likely before the end of the year. My guide to Mulgrave is...

I have been fascinated recently with voting systems for local government, and how they change - in NSW, Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia. New Zealand also has an element of choice in their local government electoral system. Each council gets to choose from one...

Ben is joined by Paul Kildea and Andre Brett to discuss the history of Australian referendums. We discuss the historical origins of referendums at both the state and federal level, the dynamics of referendum campaigns, how different states tend to vote, the voters' bias...

The process of redrawing local council wards for next year's New South Wales council elections is now quite advanced, with the councils due for a change having mostly decided on draft boundaries and put them out for public commentary, ahead of an early October...

The Western Australian Labor government has been recently going through a process of changing the structures of local government elections in the state. The process involves the replacement of first-past-the-post with preferential voting (including with the single transferable vote where more than one councillor...