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Time to Change the Electoral Act to Fix Faults in Senate Counting

When NSW Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi reached quota and was declared elected at this year’s Senate election, something very odd happened with her votes.

Faruqi’s total of 761,249 votes on election included 3,145 Coalition first preference votes. These votes had been distributed to Faruqi based on the preferences Coalition voters had written on their ballot papers. These Coalition votes represented just 0.4% of Faruqi’s total vote.

The quota for election was 712,405, so the next step in the count was to distributed Faruqi’s surplus of 48,889 votes.

At which point the count went weird.

Suddenly the number of Coalition first preference votes increased to 7,549, an inflation of 140%. Instead of Coalition votes representing 0.4% of Faruqi’s surplus, they represented 15.9%.

Of Faruqi’s total vote on election, 72.4% were first preference votes. But this was reduced to 61.0% in her surplus. On the distribution of Faruqi’s surplus, Green votes and preferences received from all other candidates were crowded out and replaced by Coalition votes. And those Coalition ballot papers that were worth 3,145 votes on receipt, suddenly became 7,549 votes when distributed as preferences.

Only two candidates remained in the count after Faruqi’s election, One Nation’s Warwick Stacey leading Labor’s Emilija Beljic in the race for the final seat. Preferences split 31,233 to Labor and 4,117 to One Nation with 13,539 votes exhausting. This narrowed Stacey’s eventual margin of victory over Beljic to just 17,326 votes or 0.35%.

The distortion in Faruqi’s surplus was not responsible for Beljic failing to pass Stacey. But everything we know about preference flows for Green and Liberal voters tells us that the final margin would have been narrower without the distortion.

The threat of this problem altering the result in close Senate contests remains. But why does it happen? In this post I’ll try to explain the problem and outline how the Electoral Act should be changed.Read More »Time to Change the Electoral Act to Fix Faults in Senate Counting

FED2025 – Party and Voter Reactions to the Senate’s Electoral Changes

The 2025 Federal election was the fourth held since the introduction of major changes to the Senate’s electoral system. The changes were to deal with the rapid increase in nominations, their impact on ballot paper and font size, and the distortion of results produced by increasingly labyrinthine preferences deals under the now abolished Group Voting Ticket (GVT) system.

For overseas (and local) readers unfamiliar with the Senate’s electoral system, I’ll start this post with a brief background on the Senate’s electoral system and explain the changes introduced since 2016.

I will then look at the four elections since the changes and to assess how parties, candidates and voters have reacted to the new system with main focus on the 2025 result.

To do this I am analysing the Senate ballot paper data released by the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC).

There is more detail inside the post, but I’ll quickly summarise my findings –

  • The 2016 changes, and a 2022 increase in party members needed to register a political party, have seen the number of parties contesting Senate elections decrease from 52 at the last election using GVTs in 2013, to 28 at the 2025 election.
  • The average number of groups on Senate ballot papers rose from 7.7 at the first divided Senate ballot paper election in 1984 to 33.7 at the last GVT election in 2013 before falling to 17.2 in 2025. The result has been smaller ballot papers and a return to larger and more readable font sizes.
  • At the 2025 election, 81.2% of voters completed their Senate ballot papers with a 1-6 sequence of preferences above-the-line (ATL). 5.8% completed fewer than 6 ATL preferences, 6.6% filled more than 6 ATL preferences, and 6.3% of ballot papers counted as ‘below-the-line’ BTL votes. There has been little change over four elections in the percentage of ballot papers in each completion category.
  • Fewer groups and smaller ballot papers are likely to have played a part in the decline in the number of ballot papers with “exhausted” preferences at the end of the count.

Read More »FED2025 – Party and Voter Reactions to the Senate’s Electoral Changes

Record Minor Party Vote at the 2022 Senate Election and how the Senate’s Electoral System Performed

The 2022 Senate election marked a new high point in support for minor parties and Independents. The long term trend of declining support for major parties continued and passed a new milestone. For the first time both major parties were outpolled by the combined vote for minor parties and independents.

Senate ‘Other’ vote reached 35.7% against 34.2% for the Coalition and 30.1% for Labor. Senate non-major party support has been higher than Labor’s vote at every Senate election since 2013, but 2022 was the first where it was also higher than the Coalition.

In the House of Representatives, minor party and Independent support remained in third place though at a record level. The Coalition polled 35.7% in the House, Labor 32.6% and all other candidates 31.7%. While support for ‘Others’ reached record levels in both chambers, the gap between support in the two chambers narrowed.

The one-third splits in Senate support did not translate into one-thirds representation. The Coalition elected 15 Senators, Labor 15, and all other parties 10. Within vote for others, the Greens elected six Senators with 12.7% of the vote while the 23.0% support for the rest elected only four Senators.

This discrepancy is down to the nature of the Senate’s electoral system. Support for the Coalition, Labor and the Greens was confined to a single ticket in each state and territory. (There was a second but very low-polling National ticket in SA.) Support for non-Green ‘Others’ may have been at 23.0%, but it was spread across 126 groups plus numerous ‘ungrouped’ candidates. As smaller parties were excluded, their preferences did not always flow to other smaller parties.

Under the group voting ticket system abolished in 2016, party negotiated deals allowed small parties to aggregate their vote. The abolition of tickets returned control over preferences to voters, and three elections since the change have revealed that voters make different preference choices to those produced by the now abolished tickets. The new system has essentially diminished the influence of preferences and made the system more proportional to the level of first preference vote in each state.

The Senate’s electoral system now effectively operates like list proportional representation with final seats allocated to groups with the highest partial quotas on first preferences. The election of Independent David Pocock in the 2022 ACT Senate race shows that preference can still determine who is elected. But such exceptions don’t undermine the basic nature of the Senate’s reformed electoral system – it advantages parties with primary votes over parties that rely on preferences.

Inside this post, I take a closer look at the national voting patterns, and also assess how the electoral system translated votes into the seats.
Read More »Record Minor Party Vote at the 2022 Senate Election and how the Senate’s Electoral System Performed

WA to Adopt State-Wide Election for the Legislative Council

The WA Government has announced its reform proposals for the Legislative Council. The proposals are based on a report by the government appointed Ministerial Expert Committee on Electoral Reform.

You can find the Committee’s report at this link. The government has made some minor tweaks to the recommendations and will introduce legislation to Parliament tomorrow.

In summary the major features of the proposal are –
Read More »WA to Adopt State-Wide Election for the Legislative Council

WA Legislative Council Reform – The Problems of Ballot Paper Design and the Number of Preferences

The McGowan government in Western Australia has appointed a Ministerial Expert Committee to recommend changes to the electoral system for the state’s Legislative Council. (You can find the Committee’s website here.)

The Committee has a number of issues to examine. Some are controversial, such as whether to change the state’s zonal electoral system. I wrote on the zonal electoral system and its unequal enrolments two weeks ago.

The proposal that has attracted least criticism is the abolition of group voting tickets (GVTs). GVTs were first introduced for Senate elections in 1984. They were introduced as a solution to a chronic high rate of informal voting and designed to make voting easier while retaining full preferential voting.

What has not been fully appreciated is that the tickets sped up voting and also simplified the counting process. GVTs meant that less than 10% of ballot papers needed to be examined for formality and re-examined for preferences during the count. The rest of the ballot papers were ticket votes, and all ticket votes for a party being the same, could be treated as block votes.

These benefits have since been outweighed by the manipulation of results produced by GVTs giving parties almost total control over between-party preferences.

For major parties, GVTs strengthened the strong flow of preferences that parties had previously achieved through influencing voters with how-to-votes. But GVTs gave the same power to small parties that previously struggled to influence preferences due to lack of members distributing how-to-votes. Even the smallest micro-parties that didn’t bother to campaign suddenly had total control over their preferences. Over time, as participants learnt how to use GVTs strategically, the system began to elect candidate from parties with tiny votes who would never been elected had voters controlled preferences.

Three jurisdictions have now abolished GVTs. In this process, great attention was paid to ensuring voters did not have to revert to the pre-1984 situation of completing vast numbers of preferences. But a price of abolishing GVTs has been to make counting more complex. It has required a switch to scanning rather than hand counting and data entering ballot papers. Complexity has also been increased by changes to formulas calculating transfer values for surplus to quota preferences.

As the Ministerial Expert Committee searches for a replacement Legislative Council electoral system, it has the advantage of being able to draw on experience with abolishing GVTs for elections to the NSW and South Australian Legislative Councils and the Commonwealth Senate.

Two models for electing the WA Legislative Council are being discussed. One retains regions, a four region model with each electing nine members the most discussed. The second is a switch to a single state-wide model.

The state-wide model in particular requires careful design. Careful thought needs to be given to ballot paper design, voter instructions, and the counting method.

Without careful design, using a single electorate to elect the WA Legislative Council could end up producing a ballot paper that is unprintable or uncountable.Read More »WA Legislative Council Reform – The Problems of Ballot Paper Design and the Number of Preferences

2019 SA Senate Election – Ballot Paper and Preferences Analysis (Part 1)

This is my latest (and much delayed) post looking at the Senate’s new electoral system, how it worked at 2019 election, how voters completed their ballot papers, and what was the influence of how-to-vote material.

This post on South Australian is my first on a six-member Senate contest. The two previous posts in this series, on the ACT Senate race and the Northern Territory Senate race, dealt with elections for two Senators and were two-party preferred races.

At the start of 2020 I published two other posts with broad overviews of the 2019 result. The first looked at the breakdown of above and below the line voting and the number of preference completed. The second looked at measures of performance, why the new system produced different results to past Senate elections. In particular, it compared the 2019 result with the 2013 half-Senate election, the last conducted using the now abolished group voting tickets.

Part 2 of this post tracks the formal distribution of preferences for the South Australian Senate. The Part 1 post below provides a more detailed analysis of preferences based on examining the electronic ballot papers.
Read More »2019 SA Senate Election – Ballot Paper and Preferences Analysis (Part 1)