Reports that Victoria is set to Abolish Group Voting Tickets

(Update Wednesday 29 July: – Legislation has been introduced today and will be debated and passed by the Assembly this afternoon. The legislation abolishes group voting tickets and adopts a similar method of ATL voting to the Senate. Voters are required to mark 5 ATL preferences and there is a savings provision so that any vote with at least a valid first preference vote remains formal. There is no change to the Victorian method of BTL voting where voters are required to complete preferences for five candidates.)

Two weeks ago I published a post highlighting that if Victoria wanted to abolish group voting tickets (GVTs) for the 2026 Legislative Council election, legislation had to be passed at the next sitting of parliament in the last week of July.

As I outlined in the post (you can find it at this link), abolishing GVTs would bring Victoria in line with the Commonwealth, New South Wales, South Australian and Western Australian parliaments. It would also implement a recommendation made twice in the last four years by the Victorian parliament’s Electoral Matters Committee.

Both The Age and Herald-Sun reported over the weekend that GVTs will be abolished and voters allowed to indicate their own preferences with an above-the-line (ATL) vote. What the reports don’t make clear is whether Victoria will adopt fully optional preferential voting as used in NSW, SA and WA. The alternative would be to copy the Senate model where ballot paper instructions are to complete a minimum number of ATL preferences. The Senate model still allows any vote with a valid ATL first preference to remain formal in line with ballot paper instructions for the GVT system.

The number of members to be elected per region may lean the Victorian decision in favour of the Senate system.

NSW, SA and WA elect their Legislative Councils using a state-wide electorate. NSW elects 21 members, South Australia 11, and Western Australia 37. A single ‘1’ vote in these systems is enough to produce a very proportional result. Over six elections since the NSW system was reformed, only twice have preferences altered the party elected as the 21st member. Two SA elections elections have seen preferences play no part in the result, while the first WA election after reform saw preferences change only one of the 37 members elected.

The complication in Victoria is members are not elected state-wide. The Legislative Council consists of five members elected from each of eight regions. The quota for election is a high 16.7%. A high quota makes it much harder to match the number of members elected by party in each region to the proportion of votes by party.

As with the Senate, where six members are elected per state, there may be an argument to encourage more ATL preferences to ensure the members elected reflect first preference votes and the preference intent of voters for excluded parties.

The Senate rule to mark at least six preferences encourages voters to complete preferences. At the 2025 Victorian Senate election, 83.4% of voters marked six preferences. Only 1.9% of voters marked a single first preference, a vote that remains formal under Senate voting rules.

Contrast this with lower preferencing rates at interstate Legislative Council experience where only a third of ballot papers have preferences. If fully optional preferential voting were adopted, then clearly there would be fewer preferences playing a part in determining the final seats in each region. It is a matter of opinion whether this is a good or bad outcome.

Fully optional preferences would work without difficulty if Victoria were electing 40 MLCs from a state-wide electorate. But Victoria can’t switch to state-wide election without a referendum, so the five members by eight regions model will be used in 2026.

In this post I’ll first summarise why the GVT system is so wrong using past election results. I’ll also look at evidence from NSW elections about how the Senate’s minimum preference numbers rule has caused more voters to complete further preferences at Legislative Council elections.

What’s Wrong with Group Voting Tickets

The rottenness of group voting tickets and how they distort election results is plain to see by looking at results from the 2018 Victorian Legislative Council election.

In Eastern Metropolitan Region, Labor won two seats from 37.0% of the vote (2.22 quotas), and the Liberal Party two from 36.1% (2.17 quotas). The Greens were the third placed party with 9.0% (0.54 quotas) more than twice the vote of the fourth placed Liberal Democratic Party. Remarkably, the fifth seat was won by Rod Barton of the 12th placed Transport Matters despite polling only 0.6% or 0.04 quotas. The Greens had 14 times as many votes as Barton but lost the seat to Barton due to deals arranged by group voting tickets. On the evidence of elections conducted since the abolition of GVTs, it would have been impossible for Barton to win from such a low vote and the final seat would have gone to the Greens. GVTs distorted the result.

In Northern Victoria Region in 2018, Labor polled 31.8% (1.91 quotas) for two seats, the Coalition 31.2% (1.87 quotas) for one seat, the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers 7.9% (0.47 quotas) missed out, as did the Greens 6.6% (0.39 quotas). The final two seats went to Derryn Hinch’s Justice Party 3.8% (0.29 quotas) and the Liberal Democrats 3.8% (0.23 quotas). Those two seats were only won because of party control over preferences. With voters filling in their own preferences, the Coalition would have won a second seat and the last seat would have been fought out between the SFF and Greens. GVTs distorted the result.

In South-Eastern Metropolitan Region, Labor polled 49.9% for 2.995 quotas and elected three members. The Liberal Party polled 29.0% (1.74 quotas) but only elected one member. The final seat was won by the 11th placed Liberal Democrats on 0.8% (0.095 quotas). Despite the second Liberal candidate polling 15 times as many votes as the Liberal Democrats, the preference deals embedded in the GVTs delivered victory to the Liberal Democrats. This result would not have occurred without the use of GVTs.

In South Metropolitan Region, the Liberal Party polled 38.2% (2.30 quotas) for two members, Labor polled 34.6% (2.07 quotas) for two members. Third place went to the Greens with 13.5% (0.81 quotas), six times the vote for the fourth placed party. Yet despite its high first preference quota, the Greens lost to the 9th placed Sustainable Australia Party who polled only a tenth of the Greens’ vote, 1.3% (0.08 quotas). Another result that could only be produced by GVTs.

Because 90-95% of all votes are cast using the group voting square above the line, all these votes are allocated to the chosen first preference party’s GVT. So during the count, 90-95% of all preferences are distributed according to these tickets. Results are engineered by the preference deals. Even parties with virtually no campaigning and no how-to-votes can deliver 90-95% of preferences thanks to GVTs. That’s how parties with high first preference votes are run down by parties with only a fraction of the first preference vote.

The technique is known as preference “harvesting”. All the minor parties swap preferences ahead of Labor, the Coalition and Greens. As each low placed party is excluded, the GVTs deliver preferences to other low polling parties. Exclusion by exclusion, the votes acrue to one of the minor parties and they eventually deliver victory over the higher polling parties as illustrated above.

That’s how the Liberal Democrats, Transport Matters Party and Sustainable Australia won seats. It wasn’t by attracting votes. It wasn’t by attracting preferences from voters completing their own preferences. It was entirely due to the pre-arranged preference tickets.

At the 2022 Victorian election, 33 of the 40 MLCs were elected overwhelmingly thanks to starting the count with the highest initial vote, that is by the actions taken by voters when marking their ballot papers. The other seven seats were filled by the pre-arranged preference deals.

At the last Senate election to use GVTs in 2013, nine of the 40 seats were filled through GVT preference deals. At the four Senate elections since GVTs were abolished, a total of 196 vacancies, only six positions were filled by candidates coming from behind on preferences. And all six were achieved by closing narrow first preference leads, not by many multiples of votes as occurred with GVTs.

We now have four Senate elections and nine interstate Legislative Council elections to assess how the electoral system works without GVTs. The answer is unequivocal. With voters completing their own preferences, it is not possible for parties with only a fraction of a higher polling party’s vote to roar up from behind to win on preferences. The strange Victorian results outlined above were only possible because GVTs were used.

When voters fill in their own preferences, the members elected tend to represent the parties that achieve more than or at least a significant fraction of a quota on first preferences. It is highly unusual for a party with less than half a quota to win election. It is still possible for preferences to deliver victory to a trailing party, but not to a party with less than half the vote for the party they pass.

The Impact of the New Senate Rules on Legislative Council Voting

Experience in 1999 with a ‘tablecloth’ sized ballot paper resulted in NSW becoming the first state to abolish GVTs. At the first two election under the new rules in 2003 and 2007, only around 15% of ballot papers were completed as ATL votes with preferences. Ballot paper data has been available for analysis at elections since 2011 and the rates at which voters have completed ATL votes with preferences is shown below.

The rate was around 15% at four NSW Legislative Council elections before the 2016 Senate changes that abolished GVTs and changed the instructions to say mark at least six ATL preferences.

At the two NSW elections since the Senate changes, the rate at which voters mark ATL preferences on NSW Legislative Council ballot papers rose to 27.6% in 2019 after one Senate election, and to 36.8% in 2023 after three Senate elections. Clearly voters have become aware that they can mark preferences above the line and done so at NSW elections despite that not being the instructions. The rate of ATL voting with preferences has also been around one third of votes under the reformed systems in South Australia and Western Australia.

The rate that voters mark ATL preferences varies by party and is influenced by how-to-votes. I’ll discuss this in a future post.

These statistics on voters marking preferences is another reason why Victoria should abolish GVTs. Under GVT voting, only the ‘1’ ATL preference is counted. Any further ATL preferences are ignored and the ballot paper is instead allocated the GVT of the first preference party.

If as the above data indicates, around a third of Victorian voters are likely to indicate ATL preferences come November, it is electoral vandalism to discard these preferences and instead substitute a party ticket. It is simply wrong to maintain GVTs for Victorian elections, to throw away the preferences that voters can give at Senate elections, and replace them with pre-arranged party deals.

And in my next post …

This post has grown long enough already so I’ll publish it for now. In my next post I will look at –

• what we see in the NSW data about the influence of how-to-votes and which parties have higher rates of their voters completing preferences.
• how the Victorian result might unfold without GVTs.