candidates

A Record Number of Candidate Nominate for Western Australian Election

For the second election in a row, a record number of candidates have nominated to contest a Western Australian election.

The surge in numbers is largely down to a surge in minor party lower house nominations in support of upper house campaigns.

A total of 463 candidates have nominated for the 59 districts in the Legislative Assembly, and another 325 for the 36 vacancies in the Legislative Council.

All candidates have now been uploaded to the ABC’s election website.
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Western Australian Election Site Updates

(This post is being updated most days. See inside post for details)

My 2021 Western Australian Election Website has been published on the ABC website. While published at the start of campaign, the site continues to have material added to it on a daily basis.

As an experiment, I’m going to maintain this post as a daily log of updates.

For anyone who wants to submit candidate information for the site, don’t send it through this blog. Please use the ABC elections e-mail link.

Wednesday 3 March

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Local Seats for Local People – Who Should be Allowed to Contest Elections

Whether candidates live in the electorate they contest is a question that induces rage with some voters.

Who are these blow-in candidates they’ve never heard of contesting the local seat?

It is a matter that raises particular attention in country seats, where being an outsider is a major disadvantage for a candidate.

But for political parties, trying to find candidates for your opponent’s safest seats is always difficult. It is an obvious truth of politics that the quality of a party’s candidates dips as the chances of the party winning a seat declines. It is a truth that becomes even more evident at elections where a party looks certain of defeat.

Serious political parties contest every seat, even if only to attract a few extra dollars from public election funding. But trying to find candidates that are qualified to stand, (think dual citizenship issues at Federal elections), doesn’t have an embarrassing social media history, and won’t start spouting loopy ideas that attract mainstream media attention, can be something of a challenge.Read More »Local Seats for Local People – Who Should be Allowed to Contest Elections