legislative council

How GVTs Have Distorted Victorian Legislative Council Elections

Summary: Change is coming to the Victorian Legislative Council’s electoral system for November’s state election. Victoria becomes the last jurisdiction to abolish group voting tickets, a system that allowed parties to control preference flows and distort election results. Voters will now control between-party preferences and the method of voting mimics the Senate system in use since 2016. The change favours parties that campaign for votes over parties that rely on preferences. Based on past results, the big losers will be minor parties whose election from low votes has been achieved by “preference harvesting” tactics, something that is impossible with group voting tickets abolished.

The Victorian Labor government’s bill to abolish group voting tickets (GVTs) for Legislative Council elections was introduced on Tuesday 28 July, passed the lower house the next day with no opposition, and will be debated in the the upper house on Tuesday 11 August.

The bill is supported by the government, opposition and Greens and will pass by week’s end. The new voting rules will be in place for November’s state election.

(Update 9:30pm 11 August: the bill passed the upper house without amendment. The next step is royal assent by the Governor at which point the amendments in the bill are incorporated into the Electoral Act.)

Inside this post I look back at the five Victorian elections that have used GVTs and estimate how the results might have looked without GVTs. In summary –

  • The new system will favour parties that attract significant first preference support and disadvantage parties that rely heavily on preferences. Based on my analysis of post-GVT Senate results, (see this post), weaker preference flows will make it very difficult for a party to be elected with less than 6% in a region.
  • Across the 2014, 2018 and 2022 elections, 24 leading candidates who began the preference distribution with more than 6% of the vote were defeated by lower polling candidates. Three of the defeated candidates polled above 12% or 0.7 quotas.
  • At the same elections there were 20 candidates elected from under 6%, including nine that polled below 3%.
  • Without GVTs, the 2014 election would have seen five fewer minor party MLCs elected, the seats instead going one Labor, two Coalition and two Greens.
  • Without GVTs, the 2018 election would have seen seven fewer minor party MLCs elected, the seats instead going one Labor, three Coalition and three Greens.
  • Without GVTs, the 2022 result would have seen six fewer minor party MLCs elected, the seats instead going one Labor, one Coalition and four Greens.
  • Over the last three elections, the number of non-Green minor party members would have fallen from 22 to 4. The number of Greens elected would have risen from 10 to 19, Labor from 47 to 50, and the Coalition from 41 to 47.

Table 1 below shows a four party breakdown of seats won at elections since 2006, along with my estimated results had there been no GVTs. My estimates assume the same parties contested election and the same party vote shares were recorded. I explain my method for estimating results inside the post.

Table 1 – Legislative Council Seats 2006-2022 – With and Without GVTs
Election Alternatives ALP L/NP GRN OTH
2006 Actual result 19 17 3 1
Estimate without GVTs 20 17 3 ..
2010 Actual result 16 21 3 ..
Estimate without GVTs 16 21 3 ..
2014 Actual result 14 16 5 5
Estimate without GVTs 15 18 7 ..
2018 Actual result 18 11 1 10
Estimate without GVTs 19 14 4 3
2022 Actual result 15 14 4 7
Estimate without GVTs 16 15 8 1

Source: Estimated results without GVTs calculated by Antony Green as set out in the post.

The changed results are due to weaker preference flows with the abolition of GVTs. Preference ‘deals’ implemented by GVTs were previously used to engineer results. Even the smallest parties could deliver preference flows above 90%. GVT deals could deliver victory to parties with little electoral support at the expense parties with up to 14 times the vote. These remarkable come from behind victories were created by GVT preference deals, not by the actions of voters.

Three of the more remarkable results occurred in 2018. In Eastern Metropolitan Region, the Transport Matters Party was elected from 0.62%, defeating a Greens candidate who began the count with 9.0%. In Southern-Eastern Metropolitan Region, the Liberal Democrats polled just 0.84% but defeated the second Liberal candidate who began the count with 12.3%. In Southern Metropolitan Region, the Sustainable Australia Party polled 1.32% but defeated the Greens on 13.5%. (Data in this paragraph has been corrected.)

Results such as these could only happen under an electoral system where voters are herded into voting for above-the-line for tickets with preferences controlled by parties.

A decade of experience with Senate elections since GVTs were abolished, and evidence from Legislative Council elections in other states, shows that preference flows are much weaker without GVTs. Larger parties that campaign actively can still influence preference decisions and create stronger preference flows, but the flows of smaller parties become almost random. This decreases the ability of parties to win from trailing positions.

When voters control preferences rather than parties, the system rewards parties that attract first preference votes over parties that rely on opaque and labyrinthine preference deals. The days of preference ‘whisperers’, preference ‘harvesting’ and ‘corralling’ preferences disappear when GVTs are abolished. Voters first preference party choices play a greater role in determining which parties elect members.

But I need to stress that the analysis in this post is about the parties that have contested the last five Victorian Legislative Council elections, not the parties contested the 2026 election.

It is clear from polls that Pauline Hanson’s One Nation will poll strongly, will elect MLCs, and probably outpoll the Greens. I make no comment on whether abolishing GVTs increases or decreases the number of MLCs that One Nation might elect.

What is certain is that abolishing GVTs will see the number of MLCs elected by party more accurately reflect vote share by party. The new system will better translate the will of the electorate into representation than any election conducted with GVTs.

Read More »How GVTs Have Distorted Victorian Legislative Council Elections

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.Read More »Reports that Victoria is set to Abolish Group Voting Tickets

Time Running Out for the Victorian Government to Abolish Group Voting Tickets

10 August – party lists updated

The long-term decline in support for Australia’s traditional parties, combined with surging support for One Nation, is creating uncertainty over who will form government after November’s Victorian state election.

Opinion polls show Labor, the Coalition and One Nation all under a third of the vote. It is difficult to translate this three-way split of votes into a seat prediction, but it points to defeat for Labor if the Liberal and National parties co-operate with One Nation on preferences.

Seats not votes determine who forms government and whether it is a majority or minority government. Turning votes into seats will come down to order of exclusion and preference flows between three or four competing candidates in each seat.

The outcome in the Legislative Council, the upper house elected by proportional representation, would be easy to pick if it was elected from a state-wide electorate like other mainland states.

But Victoria’s Legislative Council is divided into eight regions electing five members each. Five regions cover most of metropolitan Melbourne. Three others extend like spokes to the corners of the state, covering rural and regional Victoria but including some outer Melbourne suburbs.

Having only five members per region makes it very difficult to match members elected to party vote share. The high 16.7% quota makes preferences critical for turning surplus to quota votes into extra seats.

And there is another problem. Despite numerous warnings and recommendations, electoral law in Victoria still mandates that the discredited Group Voting Ticket (GVT) system will be used for November’s upper house election.

Unless the law is changed, as recommended by committee and as already changed elsewhere, the ‘preference whisperers’ will be back in business.

We have had four Federal elections since GVTs were abolished for the Senate. Since 2016 voters have grown used to numbering their own party preferences when voting above-the-line (ATL). But as it stands today, and as I explained before the last Victorian election in 2022, any ATL preferences will be discarded and replaced by the GVT of the voter’s first choice party.

Twice this term the Electoral Matters Committee has recommended that group voting tickets to be abolished. Despite support for the move from the Opposition and Greens, nothing has happened. The Electoral Act retains group voting tickets as the method by which above-the-line votes are handled in the count.

If something isn’t done in the next month, shady backroom deals will determine the composition of the Legislative Council. And if the past is anything to go by, there could be half a dozen crossbench members elected from unknown parties recording only a tiny first preference vote.

If no one party wins a majority in the lower house, the prospects of an upper house occupied by political unknowns can only complicate the task of trying to govern Victoria for the next four years.

The Legislative Council is meant to be elected by proportional representation. But with more than 90% of votes locked into pre-arranged group voting tickets, proportionality is distorted and political power is delivered into the hands of the small cabal of party negotiators who arrange the GVT preference deals.

To avoid the upper house election descending into farce, it’s time for the Allan government to act and abolish group voting tickets.

As I explain in this post, the Electoral Commission has set a deadline for changing the law ahead of the election. And as I also explain, the last minute rush of party registrations and proposed party name changes show that the preference harvesting game will kick off if GVTs are not abolished. Read More »Time Running Out for the Victorian Government to Abolish Group Voting Tickets

SA2026 – Legislative Council – Result Declared

This post provides an overall summary of the South Australian Legislative Council result. It includes tables summarising the party composition of the new Council, a list of elected and departing members, party totals including change of vote since 2022, and a breakdown of results by party and candidate. I also have some comments on the final stages of the distribution of preferences.
Read More »SA2026 – Legislative Council – Result Declared

Background on the Development of the NSW Legislative Council and its Electoral System

One of my post-retirement intentions for this blog is to bring together bits and pieces I’ve published on elections, politics and history over the past three decades.

In my career at the ABC I ran an election blog for around a decade as well as writing and publishing around 25 years worth of election guides.

This is a vast amount of material, a lot of which is no longer publicly available. The internet has undergone vast technical change over the past two decades, and the difficulty of keeping old websites in line with changing web standards has seen a lot of my older material disappear.

This post is the first of what I hope are many where I re-publish useful older material, sometimes with updates. Some of this was previously available through the ABC.

This first post is brief history of the NSW Legislative Council and its changing electoral system. I’m publishing it as background to a post under development setting out some of the stranger Council elections that took place under the indirect electoral system used between 1933 and 1978.
Read More »Background on the Development of the NSW Legislative Council and its Electoral System

Results Publication on the 2022 South Australian Election

Ahead of March’s South Australian election, I’ve prepared a publication summarising the results of the last South Australian election in 2022.

The publication includes a summary of all House of Assembly results including primary, two-candidate and two-party preferred votes, percentages and swings by district. There are also summary statistics across districts for swing, and results for Adelaide versus the rest of the state. There’s a summary of the 2020/21 redistribution as well as details of changes in Assembly and Council membership.

The publications includes detailed analysis of two-candidate preference flow data by candidate by district as well as two-party flows for the six districts that did not finish as two-party contests. The preferences section also includes aggregated preferences by district by party. All tables include reference to which candidate/party was favoured by each excluded candidate’s how-to-vote recommendation.

Finally there is detail of the Legislative Council election with tables summarised by party and by candidate. The section includes a break down by party of how many voters cast a single “1” above the line vote, and how many used the new ATL preferencing option. A summary of the preference distribution is included along with details of the Council result by each Assembly district. There’s also a summary table comparing party percentages in the Assembly and the Council.

The publication is rounded out with regional outline maps of the electoral boundaries used for the 2022 election, and there are some tables of historic SA election results.

You can find my 2022 South Australian Election results publication at this link.

Inside the post I’ve included the statistical summary from the front of the publication.Read More »Results Publication on the 2022 South Australian Election

Increase in Voters Completing Preferences at the 2023 NSW Legislative Council Election

In 2000 New South Wales became the first state to abolish Group Voting Tickets (GVTs), the system then generally used to elect state Legislative Councils and the Commonwealth Senate.

The NSW decision followed the 1999 Legislative Council election and its infamous “tablecloth” ballot paper. Confusion combined with labyrinthine preference deals made a mockery of any claim that the filling of the final vacancies reflected the will of the electorate.

The system adopted abolished GVTs and introduced a new form of voting above-the-line (ATL) where voters could direct preferences to other parties on the ballot paper by numbering ATL boxes. A single ‘1’ ATL vote was still formal, but a voter could direct preferences to others groups with an ATL voting square by indicating ‘2’, ‘3’ etc to other groups.

With Senate elections continuing to use GVTs where only a single ATL preference counted, few voters made use of the new ATL voting option at Legislative Council elections. At four elections from 2003 to 2015, more than 80% of Legislative Council ballot papers continued to be completed with a 1-only ATL vote and only around 15% of voters indicated further ATL preferences.

When the Commonwealth followed NSW in abolishing GVTs ahead of the 2016 election, it adopted different instructions on how to complete an ATL vote. Senate ballot paper instructions, and advice from ballot paper issuing officers, suggested a minimum of 6-ATL preferences be completed.

The Senate reforms included generous savings provisions permitting ballot papers with fewer than six ATL preferences to remain formal. At three Senate elections since 2016, more than 95% of ballot papers have had six or more preferences, around 80% having exactly six.

Experience with the new Senate ballot paper has clearly encouraged more voters to indicate preferences on NSW Legislative Council ballot papers.

As the chart below shows, only around 15% of voters completed ATL preferences before the Senate changes. At two NSW elections post the Senate changes, 27.6% of NSW voters completed ATL preferences at the 2019 Legislative Council election, and after experience at two further Senate elections in 2019 and 2022, the percentage of ballot papers at the 2023 Legislative Council election completed with ATL preferences rose to 39.2% .Read More »Increase in Voters Completing Preferences at the 2023 NSW Legislative Council Election

2023 NSW Election – the Race for the Final Legislative Council Vacancy

Final result: Final votes by group, the names of elected candidates and final composition of the new Legislative Council can be found on the Legislative Council Page at the ABC website.

I had intended to write something more detailed here about the final result but other pressing work intruded so just a few points at this stage.

Liberal Rachel Merton won the 21st seat defeating Animal Justice’s Alison Waters by 10,628 votes. Preferences did not change the order of election and the 21 elected candidates were the ones that could have been predicted based on first preferences at Count 1. Merton led Waters by 0.07 quotas on first preferences, a lead that was narrowed to only 0.05 quotas after preferences.

On exclusions from the point where the second Green was elected, 72.1% of preferences exhausting. 7.5% of preferences flowed to Animal Justice, 6.4% to the Coalition, 5.7% to Legalise Cannabis, 4.3% Liberal Democrats and 4.1% Shooters, Fishers and Farmers. Merton’s lead fell to under 4,000 votes before increasing to the final margin after receiving 10.2% of One Nation preferences on the exclusion of Tania Mihailuk.

At several exclusions, preferences that might have flowed to Animal Justice instead flowed to Legalise Cannabis. Animal Justice received a boost with a reasonable flow of preferences from Christian conservative Lyle Shelton, almost certainly due to donkey votes where voters preferenced left to right from Shelton in Column A to Animal Justice in Column C.

Original post inside.Read More »2023 NSW Election – the Race for the Final Legislative Council Vacancy

2022 Victorian Legislative Council Election – Party Vote Totals

UPDATE: Table has been updated with final figures.

The table displays total votes by party, percentage vote, change in vote since 2018 and the percentage of below-the-line votes by party. It also includes seats won and change in seats.

I’ve been providing commentary on the results by region which you can find at the ABC election site’s Legislative Council results.

Vote total table inside the post.Read More »2022 Victorian Legislative Council Election – Party Vote Totals