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

How many Voters mark Referendum Ballot Papers with a Cross? Not many based on evidence.

Finding – in 2009 WA held a referendum on daylight saving. A one-box ballot paper similar to the Federal referendum ballot was used and the formality rules on ticks and crosses were exactly the same. Out of 1,148,853 ballot papers, just 199 were marked with a single cross and declared informal, a rate of just 0.02%.

And in addition – as I explain later in the post, the ticks and crosses issue arises because parliament hasn’t acted to clarify the law.

At ‘The Voice’ referendum, how many people will be confused by the referendum ballot paper? The instructions are very clear to write “Yes” or “No”, but how many are going to be confused and instead use a tick or a cross?

This has become an issue because the Referendum (Machinery Provisions) Act states that where a voter has not written Yes or No, the ballot paper will be assessed for intent.

Unlike NSW electoral law, the Referendum Act doesn’t provide specific guidance on how to deal with ticks and crosses. The Referendum Act was amended earlier this year to deal with ballots marked with ‘Y’ or ‘N’, but everything else is still left to assessment of intent.

On the Australian Electoral Commission’s legal advice, the intent provision means a tick is a sign of agreement and will be counted as a Yes, but a cross is ambiguous in intent and will be treated as informal. This is the same ruling that applied at four referendums in 1988 and two in 1999.

Parliament could have amended the Act at any time in the last 35 years to address ticks and crosses, as NSW has done four times in the same period. But the politicians haven’t addressed it and now some attack the Electoral Commissioner, despite him simply applying the law as written by politicians, and despite using the same rules as applied by commissioners going back to the 1980s.

This morning “The Guardian” reports a field director for Fair Australia as saying that crosses could account for up to 5% of the vote being discounted.

This is a ridiculous figure in my experience. Due to preferential voting, Australia is devoid of ballot papers with instructions to use a tick or a cross.Read More »How many Voters mark Referendum Ballot Papers with a Cross? Not many based on evidence.

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