The Tally Room

The group voting tickets for the Victorian Legislative Council were lodged yesterday. With a record 22 separate groups running statewide and ballot papers spilling onto a second row, there appears to be three broad groupings, with some breakdown in the minor party alliances of...

Victoria's ballot papers will be larger than ever, with lower house ballots in particular growing on average by about 46% compared to 2018, while upper house ballots will also reach a record size with the same 22 party tickets running statewide as group voting...

For the last few days I've been analysing how preferences flow under the group voting tickets, but of course not every voter votes above the line, and below-the-line votes don't obey the preference deals. For today's post I wanted to examine the question: what impact...

We now have an increasing sample size of elections conducted using single transferable vote with above-the-line voting but no group voting tickets: NSW since 2003, the Senate since 2016, and South Australia's upper house since 2018. This makes it possible to analyse the results of...

I've talked a bunch about the problems with group voting tickets in the upper house and the need for people to undermine the system by voting below the line, but today I thought I would explore what played out in 2018: who won the...

Ben is joined by Benita Kolovos from the Guardian Australia and Geoff Robinson from Deakin University to discuss the upcoming Victorian state election. We set the scene, looking at the major issues which have defined the last four years and this campaign, the position...

The Greens won the seat of Prahran from third place on the primary vote in 2014. They won it again in 2018, again from third place. Yet in 2022 it's quite plausible the Greens could lose the seat despite potentially increasing their primary vote...

Politics in Victoria has been gradually becoming more multipolar over time, with a dropping vote for the major parties and an increasing presence for a variety of minor parties. Despite this trend, the vast majority of single-member electorates for parliamentary chambers like the Victorian...

One of the major stories of the recent federal election was the share of the vote for the major parties (defined here as Labor, Liberal and Nationals), and how it has been declining for decades, with a big drop in 2022. I decided to look...