senate

The Impact on Senate Election Results of Abolishing GVTs – the Lessons for Victoria

Over the next week I will publish several posts looking at the abolition of Group Voting Tickets (GVTs) in Victoria and the implications this has for the state’s Legislative Council election in November.

Work I’ve undertaken in the past, about Senate elections both before and after the abolition of GVTs, produces clear conclusions.

Abolishing GVTs will increase the importance of first preference votes and diminish the value of preference transfers. Abolishing GVTs advantages parties that campaign for votes and disadvantages those that rely on deals and transfers to be elected.

Abolishing GVTs also ends the ability of parties to conspire and use GVTs to block the election of high polling parties. It also stops parties using GVTs to elect low-polling parties that few voters have heard of into important upper house balance of power seats.

The key aim of abolishing GVTs is to end party control over between-party preferences and leave it to voters to make the decision. With 95% of votes tied up in party tickets, too many elections had been decided by opaque preferences deals that voters had little knowledge of. A new form of above-the-line (ATL) voting was created allowing voters to show preferences for parties rather than candidates. Voters still had the option to vote below-the-line (BTL) for individual candidates of any party.

In other states this has been implemented with full optional preferential voting. A voter must indicate a first preference for a formal vote, but further preferences were optional. At elections conducted under the new rules, only a third of ATL ballot papers have preferences beyond ‘1’ and exhausted preferences have come to play a part in deciding who wins the final seats. (See my previous post that covered experience with the change in NSW.)

By contrast, the Senate instructions after the abolition of GVTs has been to mark at least six preferences, though a savings provision allows any first preference vote to remain formal. Under these instructions, around 95% of ballot papers are completed above the line (ATL) with between-party preferences. Given the exhaustion rate of preferences for minor party votes, there hasn’t been much difference between the role of preferences in the two ballot marking systems.

Abolishing GVTs makes it nearly impossible to win from a low vote AND from behind on preferences. Abolishing GVTs does not prevent a party winning from a low vote, nor prevent a trailing candidate from winning on preferences, though it does make it harder. But is becomes extremely difficult to do both at the same time.

A party winning from a low vote is possible without GVTs if there is an even split of vote between remaining parties. The United Australia Party’s Ralph Babet won a Victorian Senate seat in 2022 from only 0.28 quotas (4.0%). This was because there were five parties between 0.20 and 0.28 quotas competing for one seat. Without GVTs, preference flows were relatively weak and Babet maintained his lead to win the final seat. Preferences were not responsible for his victory.

And coming from behind is possible. In NSW at the 2025 Federal election, strong preference flows from the Coalition and small right-wing parties allowed One Nation on 0.42 quotas (6.1%) to pass Labor’s third candidate on 0.63 quotas (9.1%).

Without GVTs, the classic 2013 Victorian Senate case of Ricky Muir (Australian Motoring Enthusiasts Party) on 0.5% defeating Helen Kroger (Liberal) on 11.6% would be impossible. Muir’s election was the equivalent of a lower house candidate on 1.7% defeating a candidate with 40%.

As One Nation showed in 2025, is is possible for a candidate with two-thirds of another candidate’s vote to come from behind and win on preference transfers. Voters still have their say on preferences, but without GVTs, results can’t be engineered. Muir’s case of winning from behind with only one-23rd of the winning candidate’s vote is absolutely impossible without GVTs.

And to date, every jurisdiction except except Victoria has understood this inherent problem with GVTs and abolished them. Next week it appears Victoria will be the last to join the club.

Based on One Nation’s two come from behind Senate victories in 2025, I think around 0.4 quotas is the minimum a party needs for victory, 6.5% translated into Victorian Legislative Council numbers. That’s unless you get a case like Ralph Babet’s where a seat remains to be filled and all remaining parties have a low vote.

Looking at how many parties have been elected from trailing positions, the difference produced by the abolition of GVTs for Senate elections is clear.

At the 2013 half-Senate election, the last to use GVTs, 9 of the 36 state Senate positions were won by trailing candidates. At three half-Senate elections since the abolition of GVTs, only 2 of 108 state Senate seats have been won by trailing candidates.

And both of those trailing wins were aided by Senate instructions to mark 6 preferences. Trailing wins may be even harder under instructions for ‘1’ with further preferences optional.
Read More »The Impact on Senate Election Results of Abolishing GVTs – the Lessons for Victoria

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

FED2025 – Why One Nation’s Senate victories show that the 2016 Senate electoral reforms were right

Depending on your point of view, the election of One Nation Senators to represent New South Wales and Western Australia is either vindication of Malcolm Turnbull’s 2016 Senate electoral reforms, or an argument why the system should not have been changed.

The argument against is that under the group voting tickets abolished by the reforms, parties would conspire to prevent One Nation winning Senate seats.

Famously in 1998, Labor and the Coalition swapped preferences to stop One Nation electing Senators on preferences in all states except Queensland where the new party polled a quota in its own right.

Elsewhere the major party deal resulted in the Australian Democrats electing several Senators despite polling fewer votes than One Nation.

The problem with supporting party control of preferences is that elections are about electing representatives to represent the will of the electorate, not about engineering the exclusion of certain parties.

Majority view at the time might have been that keeping One Nation out of the Senate was good, but it is a view at odds with the idea that the Senate is elected by proportional representation, and a party with significant support should have a reasonable chance of gaining representation.Read More »FED2025 – Why One Nation’s Senate victories show that the 2016 Senate electoral reforms were right

FED2025 – South Australia Senate Preference Distribution

RESULT DECLARED – The Labor Party has elected three Senators for only the second time since 1990. Labor gains a seat from the Liberal Party who are reduced to two seats. The Greens have retained the seat they have elected at every election since 2007.

The Liberal Party elected three Senators in 2019 but in 2025 its vote has slipped under two quotas. Alex Antic and Anne Ruston have been re-elected, but third Senator David Fawcett has been defeated.

Sarah Hanson-Young will be re-elected for the Greens, her party having polled close to a quota.

Labor with 2.66 quotas elect two and after preferences elected a third Senator. Sitting Senators Marielle Smith and Karen Grogan have been re-elected and Charlotte Walker has been elected as Labor’s third Senator. Walker sets a record as the youngest Senator ever elected. She turned 21 on election day.

One Nation’s Jennifer Game polled 0.37 quotas but could not close the gap on preferences. There’s more on vote trends and the distribution of preferences inside the post.Read More »FED2025 – South Australia Senate Preference Distribution

Would Creating Extra Senators for the Territories change the House of Representatives

A report from ABC Darwin overnight again raises the question of whether the Albanese government will increase the number of territory Senators.

Special Minister of State, Senator Don Farrell, referred to a looming report of the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters. The story was last reported around a month ago.

Both the ACT and NT currently elect two Senators. They are elected for maximum three year terms, with their terms tied to the electoral cycle of the House of Representatives.

This differs from state Senators who are elected for fixed six-year terms with each state having a constitutionally protected equal number of Senators.

Currently each state elects 12 Senators with half (six) elected every three years. (All 12 are elected at double dissolution elections.) The number of Senators per state was set at six in 1901, increased to 10 in 1949 and the current 12 in 1984. Two Senators for each territory were added in 1975.

The question I’m usually asked about an increase in territory Senators is whether this would cause an increase in the size of the House of Representatives.

The short answer is no, as I’ll explain in this post.Read More »Would Creating Extra Senators for the Territories change the House of Representatives

The Victorian Legislative Council’s Rotten Electoral System – part 1

Victoria is the only Australian jurisdiction that continues to elect its upper house using the discredited Group Voting Ticket (GVT) system.

GVTs in Victoria give parties almost total control over the distribution of preferences, which flows through to controlling who wins the balance of power in the Legislative Council.

GVTs have been abolished in every state and for the Senate because they can be manipulated to elect parties with only a tiny percentage of the vote, a result that distorts the intended proportionality of the chamber’s electoral system.

In the lower house voters control preferences. Parties and candidates can only try to influence voters in how they complete their preferences. It is the same for the reformed Senate electoral system where voters now control the flow of between-party preferences, not parties.

As I explain in this post, the rottenness of GVTs is revealed when you examine the proportion of ‘above-the-line’ (ATL) votes that are under party control at Victorian Legislative Council elections compared to the related data for non-GVT Senate elections.

In Victoria, 100% of every ATL vote for every party, whether big or small, flows according to the party ticket.

In contrast, the 2022 Senate election saw major parties lucky to influence even the second preference of 50% of ATL votes, and the rate dropped precipitously for smaller parties.

It is without doubt that the reformed Senate system delivers an outcome that reflects the preferences of voters, where in Victoria the use of GVTs means the result reflects the decisions made by the tiny cabal of officials who negotiate the preference deals.Read More »The Victorian Legislative Council’s Rotten Electoral System – part 1

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

2022 Senate Election and Ballot Paper Completion Types

The 2022 Senate election was the third since the 2016 abolition of group voting tickets. These tickets had previously allowed parties to control the distribution of between-party preferences by allowing voters the choice of voting for only one pre-arranged party ticket.

The new system put voters in control of between-party preferences. Voters could indicate ordered preferences for parties ‘above the line’ (ATL) on the ballot paper, or for individual candidates ‘below-the-line’ (BTL).

The changes also ended full preferential voting in favour of partly optional preferential voting. Ballot paper instructions stated to mark at least six ATL or 12 BTL preferences. Generous savings provisions were adopted, with any ATL vote with a valid first preferences being saved as formal, and any BTL vote with at least six preferences also being saved.

The changes were based on similar reforms ending party control over preferences adopted in the states. New South Wales abolished upper house group voting tickets at the 2003 state election, South Australia in 2018, and Western Australian will abolish them at the next state election in 2025. Only Victoria continues to use group voting tickets.

The major difference between the state reforms and the Senate system is the states have made ATL preferences fully optional. State instructions are to mark one square above the line with further preferences optional. The number of BTL preferences required varies from state to state.

The Senate instructions state to mark a minimum six ATL preferences, though as already mentioned, any ballot paper with at least a valid ATL first preference is saved as formal.

The release of 2022 ballot paper data has revealed an unchanged pattern in how voters completed their ballot papers. As at the two previous elections in 2016 and 2019, around 80% of all 2022 Senate ballot papers were completed according to the ballot paper ATL instructions with a sequence of six ATL preferences.
Read More »2022 Senate Election and Ballot Paper Completion Types