The Tally Room

There has been a long term trend in Australian politics of voters shifting away from casting a ballot on election day, in favour of voting earlier in the campaign. This has usually taken place through two methods: an in-person pre-poll vote, or a postal...

Tasmania's upper house holds elections every year in May, with two or three out of the 15 electorates up for election each year, over a six year cycle. Two seats were due to hold elections next Saturday, May 7, those being Elwick in the northern...

This election will see a record number of candidates on the ballot paper for the House of Representatives, with 1203 candidates running, up from the previous record of 1188 in 2013. In this post I'm analysing the relationship between the size of the ballot paper...

I was wondering recently about voting diversity within an electorate. I'm specifically talking about how much the vote varies from one booth to another across a local electorate's geographic area. You certainly notice variation when looking at booth maps - some seats are very...

I have seen a lot of commentary in the last week about the low polling position of both major parties, and whether that might make it impossible for either side to form a majority government. While it is true that chances of a hung parliament...

Ben is joined by Duncan McDonnell and Marija Taflaga to discuss the closing of nominations. We discuss numbers of women and Aboriginal candidates nominating at the election, and the impact of increasing ballot sizes on the House informal vote. We also discuss the electorate...

Nominations were declared for the federal election yesterday, and we now have the final official lists of candidates. We've seen a record number of candidates running for the House of Representatives, despite the number of parties running candidates falling to the lowest level since 2010....

Ben is joined by Narelle Miragliotta and Stewart Jackson to discuss the rise of the Voices independents movement, and the Victorian seat of Casey. This podcast is supported by the Tally Room's supporters on Patreon. If you find this podcast worthwhile please consider giving your...

I've been focused recently on the longer historical trends which play out beyond the individual election cycle, or even beyond a single decade of political history. So much of electoral analysis is focused on the swings between one election and the next, and looking...

In yesterday's post I explained my dataset of election results from 2004-2019 adjusted for 2022 boundaries. In today's post I use that data to explore how seats have changed their political position relative to the rest of the country over this period. Every electorate has...