FED2025 – Independent Two-Party Preferred Preference Flow Data

The 2025 House of Representatives election was the first where more than a third of primary votes were cast for ‘Others’.

In total, minor parties and Independents recorded 33.6% of the primary vote. This was more than 31.8% for the Coalition and only one percent short of Labor’s vote.

The rise in support for ‘Others’ has changed the nature of seat contests at House elections. Elections today are far removed from the days when almost all seats finished as two-party preferred contests between Labor and the Coalition.

The word ‘classic’, which I’ve always associated with vintage cars and ice cream marketing, has been adopted by the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) to describe traditional Labor versus Coalition contests. Or rather the AEC calls all other combinations of final candidates after preferences as ‘Non-Classic’, which it helpfully provides a list of on its election results website. (2025 list here)

In this post I’m providing information on two-party preferred preference flows in these Non-Classic seats, data that has not previously been available. This includes preference flow splits between Labor and the Coalition from votes cast for Independents in Non-Classic contests.

Until 1983, preferences were only distributed in seats where no candidate reached 50% of the primary vote. The AEC began to conduct distributions in all seats for ‘information purposes’ in 1984. That election saw every seat finish as a two-party preferred race.

Every election since has seen at least one Non-Classic contest. And as the chart below shows, the numbers have ballooned at the last four elections.

The chart above is based on all Non-Classic contests. The last three elections have seen a particular surge in these contests involving Independents. In 2019 there were seven final counts that involved Independents, rising to 16 in 2022 and 20 in 2025.

The AEC continues to do full distributions of preferences to the final pairing of candidates in every seat. Since the 1990s it has also undertaken alternative two-party preferred counts in every seat. (Except in Bradfield in 2025 for reasons explained later.)

The AEC counts preferences in two ways. First is by conducting the legally required full distribution of preferences in every seat to produce a two-candidate preferred count. Second, the AEC tallies what are called ‘preference flows’ in every seat for both two-candidate and two-party preferred finishes. I’ll describe how preference flows are calculated inside the post.

Undertaking a Full Distribution of Preferences

Even if not needed, the AEC is legally required to undertake a full distribution of preferences in every seat. At the 2025 election, 11 seats were won on first preferences, another 34 were decided part way through the distribution, and 105 required a full distribution to determine the winning candidate.

The process involves successively excluding the lowest polling candidate at each stage of the count. All ballot papers for the excluded candidate are examined to determine the next available preference for a continuing candidate. The ballot papers are then transferred to the voter’s choice of continuing candidate.

Only the voter’s preferences written on the ballot paper are examined. Candidates and parties cannot determine or over-ride the preferences written by the voter. The process is repeated until only two-candidates remain, and the candidate with the higher vote is declared the winner.

The final count is called the two-candidate preferred count. If the final two candidates represent Labor and the Coalition, this total is also called a two-party preferred count, a ‘classic’ finish under the AEC’s new terminology.

Full preference distributions are only carried out after the finalisation of the primary vote count. On election night and through the post-election counting period, published preference counts are issued but called ‘indicative’ counts, obtained by tallying preferences flows. Indicative counts are usually enough to work out who is winning, but legally a the declaration of a winner usually awaits the official distribution of preferences. In cases where the AEC cannot work out the final pairing, as in the Melbourne seat of Calwell in 2025, the AEC does not release indicative counts.

Preference Flow Counts

On election night and in the days that follow, the AEC conducts ‘indicative’ counts between two candidates nominated before the night as likely to be in the final pairing after preferences. If the wrong pairing is chosen, or if the pairing becomes unclear in the days that follow, the AEC re-does the count for a different pairing.

These counts are called preference flows. They do not measure the path of a candidate’s preferences thorugh a distribution, but rather the destination of the preferences. It is tally of votes from an excluded candidate to each of the final two candidates. So if a candidate had 1,000 votes, and of those 600 flowed to Labor and 400 to Liberal, both of those numbers would be preference flows. We could convert them to percentages and say 60% of the excluded candidate’s preferences flowed to Labor and 40% to Liberal.

For every electorate on the AEC’s Tally Room website, you can find a complete count out of preference flows, and percentage flows, from each excluded candidate to the final two candidates in the race.

You can also find state and national totals of two-party preferred preference flow data. But what you can’t find is two-party flow data for individual Non-Classic seats. On the results page for Wentworth in 2025 you can find Liberal-Independent preference flow data by candidate, but the Labor-Liberal two-party preferred flow data by candidate is not available.

But the data is collected, which is how the state and national preference flows are calculated. But because for so many elections there were few Non-Classic contests, the AEC did not developed software and scripts to extract and publish the two-party preference flow data by seat for Non-Classic counts.

Where has the flow data in this post comes from?

Before the 2022 election, I approached the AEC and pointed out that two-party flow data for Non-Classic seats was clearly being collected by the AEC, but it was not published by electoral division.

After discussion the AEC agreed to extract the data by division. At the time the AEC informed me that the data would be added to its standard package of finalised election result data.

To date the data has not been published on to the AEC’s website, but the AEC did extract and provided the data to me. As there is nothing secret about the data, I have chosen to publish the data through this post. (Links below)

For minor parties, the two-party preferred flows in Non-Classic seats look very similar to those in classic contests. In seats where the Greens reached the final pairing, Non-Classic preference flows from the Greens to Labor are stronger than in Classic contests.

Of greater interest in the Non-Classic data are the flows from high polling Independent candidates at the last three elections. This data has not previously been available and is published here for the first time.

Links to the Data

From the AEC data, I’ve prepared documents to be found at the links below with tables showing the alternative two-party preferred preference flows by candidate for Non-Classic divisions.

• 2019 Federal election (15 electorates)
• 2022 Federal election (27 electorates)
• 2025 Federal election (34 electorates)

I’ve also prepared a much longer document (40 pages) that includes tables of preference flow data for all completed two-candidate preferred and two-party preferred counts at the 2025 election. You can find the document here.

Note there are no two-party entries for Bradfield at the 2025 election as the AEC abandoned two-party preferrence flow counting as the official two-candidate preferred count became excruciatingly close. With the looming threat of a Court of Disputed Returns case, the double handling of ballot papers for the two-party preferred count was abandoned.

Independent Two-Party Preferred Preference Flows in 2025

The chart below shows the two-party preferred preference flow data for 21 Independents in contention at the 2025 election. The table excludes Bradfield as explained above, but includes two Independents for Calare. Kate Hook had contested Calare as an Independent in 2022 and finished second, while Andrew Gee had been the Nationals MP for Calare in 2022 but resigned from the party and contested the 2025 election as an Independent. I have included Mayo MP Rebekha Sharkie in the table though technically she is the one candidate and representative of the Centre Alliance.

Knowing the data in this table is certain to be mis-represented or mis-understood, I need to stress several important points.

First, none of the preference flows in the above documents or shown below have anything to do with the victory or defeat of each Independent. Nor did they play any party in the re-election of the Albanese government.

This data is alternative preference flow data collected for information purposes. The data is for a count that did not determine the winner. With the exception of Kate Hook in Calare, every candidate listed in the table below was in the final pairing of candidates at the end of the official distribution of preferences. The preferences were never distributed to determine the winning candidate.

Second, if anyone uses this data to say, for instance that Monique Ryan sent 83.3% of her preferences to Labor, then they either have zero knowledge of how preferential voting works, or they are deliberately mis-representing the data to spread mis-information.

Third, to the best of my knowledge, all of these Independents issued how-to-votes advocating a vote for the Independent and made no suggestion for further preferences. These preference flows were produced by voters making up their own mind on preferences as the candidate made no suggestion.

The preference flows in the chart below have been accumulated and turned into percentages. The vote data behind the percentages for Kooyong for instance are that a total of 38,955 first preference votes were cast for Monique Ryan. Of those votes, 32,463 were completed with preferences that listed the Labor candidate higher than the Liberal candidate, and 6,492 listed Liberal before Labor.

Ryan issued an open how-to-vote asking for a first preference vote and left it to each voter on how they would complete preferences. For people who repeat the nonsense that voters blindly copy how-to-vote preference recommendations, Ryan’s preferences show that voters can make up their own minds.

The full data for all candidates can be found at the links above. The data for the 21 Independents who are of most interest are shown below.

You can sort the data by any column in the table.

A few comments on the above table.

• I have no answer to why the flows in the Victorian ‘teal’ seats of Kooyong and Goldstein are so much stronger than similar ‘teal’ seats in NSW. Something similar occurred in 2022.
• Ziad Basyouny was a pro-Palestine candidate contesting Watson. Unlike the case with Independents in other traditional Labor seats, the Liberal Party chose to recommend prefernces to Labor ahead of the independent.
• Generally the preference flows to Labor were weaker in rural seats. Most of these seats are towards the bottom of the table. Surveys have consistently shown that in rural electorates, who a candidate is rather than who they represent can be important. Electors who normally support the Coalition could vote for an Independent knowing who they are. I presume this is why there were more preferences to the Coalition in regional and rural seats.
• Former Liberal candidate Dai Le won the traditionally very safe Labor seat of Fowler in 2022. She is the only Independent apart from Andrew Wilkie elected in a traditional Labor seats and had one of the lowest rate of preferences flows to Labor. Presumably a higher proportion of Liberal voters voted for Le in this Labor heartland seat than for Independents in other seats. Interestingly, Le’s preferences were the only ones to change significantly compared to 2022. Le’s preferences to Labor flowed only 36.2% to Labor in 2022 but 58.2% in 2025.
• Andrew Gee in Calare was the only Independent whose preferences favoured the Coalition, perhaps not surprising as he was the seat’s former National MP./

In a post published last week, The Success of Local Independents – Kooyong, I discussed how the preference flows from Monique Ryan to Labor were significantly boosted by the number of ex-Labor and ex-Greens who voted first preference for Ryan and then directed preferences to Labor. As I set out in the post, the proportion of former Liberals voting for Ryan and giving preferences to Labor had to be lower than the total figure.

The same comment applies to all the Independents shown in the above table. The preferences to Labor from each Independent were boosted by Labor and Greens voters switching to give a first preferences for the Independent. (Fowler is a likely exception.) For that reason, the proportion of Liberal and National voters who voted for the Independent and gave preferences to Labor must be lower than the percentage shown in the table.

Once again, check out the full detail of Non-Classic two-party preference flows in the documents linked above.