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.
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