Informal Voting

SA2026 – Does the SA Ticket Vote Savings Provision Matter

One Nation was accused of using South Australia’s ticket vote savings provision to harvest preferences at the state election. In fact One Nation’s tickets were entirely in line with the party’s promise of no deals on preferences. But it appears that registered how-to-votes should be clearer in saying number all squares.

As I explained earlier this week, South Australia has a unique provision in its Electoral Act that applies registered preference tickets to ‘save’ votes that would otherwise be informal.

Misunderstanding of the provision generated commentary during the election campaign about parties controlling preferences through the tickets. In particular there was criticism of One Nation’s how-to-votes that did not recommend preferences. The how-to-votes recommended voting ‘1’ for the One Nation candidate before saying to number all the other squares.

Was this just a way of encouraging One Nation voters to vote ‘1’ and then grab control of the vote’s preferences through the application of the ticket vote?

I’ll get on to the mechanics of the One Nation how-to-vote in 2026 inside the post, but first want to look at how the provision has worked in the past .

The purpose of the registered tickets is not to grab preferences. It is to ‘save’ votes votes that would otherwise be informal, to count votes that would be informal at a Federal election.

Some confusion is understandable as any mention of ‘ticket voting’ invokes memory of the now abolished group voting ticket system that distorted Senate elections until abolished in 2016.

The two systems are not comparable. Senate ticket voting turned preferences into a tradeable commodity allowing the engineering of election results with parties electing Senators despite tiny first preference vote shares.

That was possible because Senate ticket votes represented around 95% of all votes. In stark contrast, the South Australian ticket system applies only to a small percentage of votes, votes that would otherwise have been informal. The percentage of formal votes that have had tickets applied has been, wait for it, between 3% and 6% over the past 40 years.

And of those ballot papers that were saved, more than two-thirds were never counted out as preferences. They were saved by the ticket vote provision and only their first preferences were counted.

(For more information on the tickets, read this backgrounder produced by the Electoral Commission of South Australia.
Read More »SA2026 – Does the SA Ticket Vote Savings Provision Matter

From the archives – the South Australian Ticket Vote Savings Provision

One of the most muddled aspects of the recent South Australian election was reference to lower house ticket votes.

I’d started to write a post on the subject referring to an Electoral Backgrounder published by the Electoral Commission of South Australia (ECSA) in 2020. The backgrounder explains how the system works, provides background statistics on its use, and summarises the arguments for and against the provision. It’s difficult to link to the backgrounder so I’ve made it available on my site here.

The backgrounder references an article I published on the subject as part of the ABC’s 2006 South Australian election site. I barely remember it and the old election sites are no longer available. But digging around on the ABC’s old content server, I found the original article.

I intend to cover the subject in more detail tomorrow with statistics on how many votes are saved by the ticket voting system. But until then, I’m re-publishing my article from 2006. I’ve added a few notes in the text where the rules have been changed since 2006.
Read More »From the archives – the South Australian Ticket Vote Savings Provision

The Changing Pattern of Results by Vote Type

With counting complete, the Australian Electoral Commission has returned the writ to the Governor-General formally declaring “The Voice” referendum defeated.

The final count has confirmed what was observed on election night, that there was a massive difference between how people voted in person on polling day compared to votes cast in the two weeks of early voting.

My professional interest in this difference is the impact the growing and variable gap between polling day and early votes has on when we know results on election night.

As I outlined in a previous post, 83.8% of votes were cast on polling day at the 1999 Republic referendum. In 2023 the figure was close to half at only 43.7%.

There has been a huge increase in pre-poll voting since its availability was first liberalised in 2010. Over the 13 years since, the number of polling day votes has declined. While pre-poll voting centres are counted and reported on election night, the larger number of votes taken per centre compared to polling places means pre-polls generally report later in the evening. At recent by-elections, all polling places have reported their results before the first pre-poll centre reported.

With pre-poll counting revealing different trends, and unreliably different trends as well, it means that close elections will take longer to call on election night.

Pre-poll and postal voting has always had a conservative lean compared to election day voting, but never have we seen a gap as wide as at the referendum.

When non-polling day votes made up less than one-in-five votes, you could factor in the last election’s postal and pre-poll trend safe in the knowledge there were not enough votes to shift a result more than a few percentage points.

With early votes now outnumbering polling day votes, an early prediction based on polling day votes can be significantly shifted. That is shown clearly by the referendum.

At the 2022 Federal election, the Labor two-party preferred vote declined 1.6 percentage points between the tally of polling day votes and the final count. That was high by past election trends.

But the shift was even greater at the referendum. The Yes% shifting down a remarkable 3.8% between the tally of polling day votes and the final result.

The table below breaks down the referendum Yes vote by vote type and compares it to the same categories for Labor’s two-party preferred vote at last year’s Federal election.

Vote By Type – 2022 Federal Election and 2023 Referendum Compared
Percent of Total Votes Percent of Vote
Vote Type 2022 2023 ALP 2PP Yes “Swing”
Polling Day Ordinary 45.1 43.7 53.7 43.7 -10.0
Pre-Poll Ordinary 33.3 35.3 50.6 35.4 -15.2
Postal 14.3 11.0 49.1 33.1 -16.0
Pre-Poll Declaration 3.6 4.3 53.3 44.7 -8.6
Absent Votes 3.2 4.4 57.4 48.9 -8.5
Other vote types 0.5 1.3 59.1 47.7 -11.4
Total .. .. 52.1 39.9 -12.2

Read More »The Changing Pattern of Results by Vote Type

Electoral Law, Savings Provisions and Senate Reform

Someone reading my article on reforming the WA Legislative Council’s electoral system reminded me of a speech I did a number of years ago on Senate electoral reform and issues to do with savings provisions.

The speech was at the launch of a UNSW Law Journal special Issue number 39(1) with various papers on electoral law.

The Journal had several papers on different areas of electoral law. I addressed each of the papers before spending much of the speech on savings provisions and in particular looking at the issue of savings provisions with the reformed Senate electoral system.

The speech was shortly before the 2016 election, after the Senate electoral reforms had passed, but before they were ruled constitutional by the High Court.

Having watched the speech back, I thought it worth sharing and it can be viewed via the YouTube link in the post.Read More »Electoral Law, Savings Provisions and Senate Reform

Candidates, Informal Voting and Optional Preferential Voting

In the final week of parliamentary sittings, Queensland LNP Senator James McGrath tabled the report of the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters (JSCEM’s) inquiry into the conduct of the 2019 Federal election. (You can find the report here.)

One of the controversial proposals in the report, and one opposed by Labor and Green members of JSCEM, was a recommendation to move from full or compulsory preferential voting (CPV) to optional preferential voting (OPV) for House of Representatives elections.

The report provides few arguments in favour of OPV. The recommendation for OPV appears suddenly at the end of a brief discussion on informal voting, in particular noting the impact OPV’s use at NSW elections has on informal voting at Federal elections. Senate McGrath presented a different argument for OPV when tabling the JSCEM report in the Senate, referring to OPV as a measure “to maximise voter choice”.

I’ve written on OPV many time previously, and I would suggest reading this post I wrote in 2013 after a previous suggestion from the Coalition about introducing OPV.

Informal voting will always be higher under compulsory preferential voting because ballot papers with faulty numbering have few options for salvation available. This compares with OPV where ballot papers with incomplete, duplicate or missing numbers, or completed with a single tick or cross, can count for candidates to the extent that a voter’s intent is clear.Read More »Candidates, Informal Voting and Optional Preferential Voting