SA2026 – Legislative Council – Result Declared

What does the number mean after the candidate’s fate? eg re- elected 10 or elected 6th?

COMMENT: Candidates are elected in an order determined by the count process. The numbers 1 to 11 next to elected or re-elected is that order.

Antony question will there be a pdf document for the upper house results in all of the Individual lower house electorates for the 2026 south Australian election?

COMMENT: I don’t know. They have changed a lot of their software since 2022.

Thanks Antony, for making a bizarre process clearer (5948 counts!).
In the formula for the Quota, what is the purpose of the 2nd +1 ? What difference does it make if it is 94,828 or 94,829?
When groups submit a Ticket prior to the election, it appears that some don’t include all candidates, as the number of exhausted votes (90,099) exceeds the number of below the line votes (66,201)

COMMENT: SA and WA carry out a single count for every bundle of votes received by a candidate. So if when excluded a candidate has votes sourced from 10 other candidates, then this corresponds to 10 counts, one for each receipt from another candidate, distributed as bundles in the order they were received. The Senate system excludes all votes received at the same transfer value no matter when received. This is why SA and WA have huge count numbers. SA should accumulate its reports by stop points, say accumulating all distributed votes into a report that only has a count when an exclusion is completed. Or adopt the Senate counting method.

If you do an integer division of the total votes, that is round the fraction down, then if you add 1 to the quota, the total of filled quotas will leave fewer than a quota left over.

There are no group voting tickets in SA. If a voter votes ‘1’ above the line, the vote has preferences for the chosen party and no other party. Only voters can send preferences to another party. That’s why so many votes exhausted as two-third of voters only mark a single 1 and none of them have preferences.

Antony you wrote above

“The better argument for preferential voting is it allows choice of candidate, something not allowed by List PR.”

But is alive and kicking in the Netherlands where the entire country is a single constituency and every party candidate is listed on the ballot paper (and yes some parties list 150 candidates). Most people just mark the first box for the lead candidate but some people do mark against a particular name.

The threshold for a seat is 1/150. A threshold of 0.67%

But if a list candidate achieves 25% of the electoral quota (0.17% of the above quota) they are elected first – even ahead of the lead candidate of their party.

COMMENT: You are right but I deliberately didn’t want to get into open and closed list PR systems. You have that discussion in Australia and people want to have preferences within the ticket, and then what about preferences between parties. The Hawke government tried to introduce closed List D’Hondt for the ACT at its first election in 1989, a very simple electoral system. But it was so mis-understood that it had both quotas and preferences added in its passage through the Senate and produced a system that was hard for voters to understand and very difficult to count.

South Australia, the first state to introduce PR for its upper house, was concerned that electing 11 members by PR-STV was too complex to count. It was in the wake of the 1974 Senate election when a giant NSW ballot paper required voters to complete 73 preferences, drove up informal voting rates and slowed voting. It was why NSW adopted the 1970s Senate system but without full preferences when it introduced upper house PR elections in 1978.

The 1975 SA system was closed list PR with the same Droop quota used at all Australian PR elections and a highest remainder method for allocating the final seats. The inventiveness of the SA system was the use of two quotas. Voters could only vote for a party or group list, not candidates, but optionally could preference other groups. Effectively this produced only one further preference. On first preferences the quota was applied and parties with less than half a quota were excluded and had preferences distributed to one of the remaining groups. A new Droop quota based on the remaining votes was then applied for the remaining party/groups to determined how many seats to which each party was entitled.

The legal view is that the Australian Constitution prevents the use of closed list PR and the allocating of seats to parties for Senate elections. Section 7 of the Constitution states that Senators must be directly elected, which is viewed as meaning the method of voting must be candidate based. The system can’t first allocate seats based on party vote and from that determine which candidates are elected. Above-the-line voting has been challenged on this basis, but the High Court has ruled the Constitution does not prevent parties running tickets of candidates given the proportional nature of the electoral system. There may be party tickets, but the votes are counted based on votes for candidates. But for all intents and purposes, the Senate system in use since 2016 operates as closed list PR with highest remainder, with occasional cases where preferences vary which party wins the finals seats.

WA has a similar state constitutional provision which is why they now conduct PR-STV elections for 37 Legislative Council members. How much quicker and easier would it be to use List-PR for WA elections.