The Voice

The Voice Referendum Results by Vote Type and Electoral Division

10 November – The AEC has carried out its final adjustments to the roll to take account of deaths, re-instated voters and several other causes of adjustment. This reduced national roll by around 5,000 voters and lifted the final turnout figure from 89.92% to 89.95%.

In this post I’m publishing several charts dissecting the referendum result by Vote Type and by electoral division. The post includes a table of Referendum Yes percentages and comparison columns for Labor two-party preferred percentage from the 2022 election, plus the gap between these two figures.

The electorate table shows how much lower the Yes% vote was in many traditional Labor seats. The seats where the Yes% was higher are clustered in seats won by Greens and ‘teal’ Independents at the 2022 election, and also several Liberal seats gained by Labor.

The ‘gap’ column shows a similar pattern to the 1999 Republic referendum. Both the 1999 and 2023 referendums saw Yes support distributed very differently from two-party preferred patterns at the preceding Federal election. The 1999 referendum pattern was also very different to the 2001 Federal election, which suggests the 2023 referendum is unlikely to be a guide to voting patterns at the 2025 Federal election.

That’s with the possible exception of the result in seats lost by the Liberal Party in 2022. Of the 17 Liberal seats that voted for the Republic in 1999, only five were won by the Liberal Party in 2022. The other twelve seats are now held by Labor, the Greens and ‘teal’ Independents. Eight of these seats voted for The Voice in 2023.Read More »The Voice Referendum Results by Vote Type and Electoral Division

The Most Meaningless Graph I’ve Ever Drawn

Below is the most pointless, meaningless and useless graph I’ve ever drawn in my life.

It plots the % No vote by electoral division on the vertical axis against the percentage of Indigenous residents in each electorate on the horizontal axis.

And by using Indigenous residents on the x-axis, I am overstating the number of Indigenous voters. I didn't get chance to extract the data for aged over 18, or deal with turnout issues, both of which reduce the percentage of Indigenous voters compared to residents. Read More »The Most Meaningless Graph I’ve Ever Drawn

A few Regional Tables on The Voice Referendum Results

The older I get the harder I find it to pull my brain together and write analysis pieces the day after an election broadcast.

I thought the option that required the least writing effort was to publish some of the total tables from the ABC’s election computer. These category totals are not available on the ABC website but I did present them as graphics at various times on Saturday night.
Read More »A few Regional Tables on The Voice Referendum Results

How Might the Referendum Results Come In

Where to find referendum results? Google points a lot of people looking for election result here to my blog on election night. Currently I’m busy on television so can’t be of much assistance. If you are live results, check out the ABC’s Referendum results site for everything you need to know after 6pm eastern time.

When results for ‘The Voice’ referendum report on Saturday night, they will arrive in a fearsome rush.

In preparation for Saturday night’s coverage, I’ve been digging back through some of my working documents for the 1999 Republic referendum. I also checked out the television coverage through ABC archives.

My memory was that results poured in, but checking the archives proved the rate of reporting was faster than I remembered. By 7:30pm in the 1999 count, half the national vote had reported and NSW had reached 68% counted and Victoria 65%. That is around twice the first preference votes that would have been reported by that time at a general election.

The results will report just as quickly on Saturday, though they may not reach the same percentage counted by 7:30. As I pointed out in a previous post, 80% of votes were cast on election day in 1999 where the equivalent figure in 2023 will be under 50%.

But fewer votes in polling places means the votes will be quicker to count, so the votes reported may reach 50% very quickly. From there it may slow down for a while given how long it takes to count some of the giant pre-poll centres. It has been a feature of recent by-election counts that there is a pause between the point when all polling places have reported their results, and when pre-poll counts are completed and reported.

But what will the early figures look like on election night? For that I again went back to my 1999 figures.Read More »How Might the Referendum Results Come In

How Referendum Results Relate to Levels of Party Support

The Voice Referendum is being put by and overwhelmingly backed by the Albanese Labor government. It is opposed by the National Party and is opposed by large parts of the Liberal Party including Opposition Leader Peter Dutton. It is largely supported by the Greens and ‘teal’ Independents, and opposed by Pauline Hanson’s One Nation.

It is a pattern of party support that suggests referendum night results might follow traditional party divides. This is despite the referendum being held away from a general election, away from a campaign with how-to-votes advocating a vote for or against the government as well as for or against the referendum.

To examine the role of partisanship in referendum voting patterns, I look back at two very different referendums and the relationship between Labor/Coalition election voting by electoral division, and Yes/No referendum results.

The first is the Simultaneous Elections referendum held in conjunction with the 1984 Federal election. With both Labor and Coalition how-to-votes having clear Yes and No referendum recommendations, there was an extremely strong relationship between two-party preferred results by division and Yes/No referendum results.

But the second case, the 1999 republic referendum, was a very different campaign and produced results with a much weaker link between party voting and Yes/No results. Held separately from a general election, the republic referendum was not combined with the partisanship inducing vote for or against the government. The Republic referendum is also unique in being the only referendum put by a Prime Minister who advocated a No vote.

Like The Voice referendum, the Republic was backed by Labor and generally opposed by the Coalition, though with some significant Liberal supporters of a republic. The result produced a confusing mosaic of results where safe Liberal seats voted Yes and safe Labor seats voted no.

As I outline in this post, you can explain more about the pattern of Republic referendum results by looking at the social status of electorates rather then the level of Labor or Coalition support at the previous year’s Federal election.

So are these high social status Republic supporting electorates the ‘elites’ campaigned against in 1999 and so often mentioned again in The Voice campaign? The majority of voters have more interest in getting by day to day than worrying whether ‘The Voice’ will improve the position of First Nations Australians. Does railing against ‘elites’ tap into resentment against those with more time and money to worry about such issues?

Having covered the 1999 Republic campaign and written on the results at the time, I see strong similarities with the current Voice referendum. And on Saturday night I expect to see a very similar pattern of results, with Yes results strongest in high social status metropolitan seats irrespective of whether they are Labor, Liberal, Green or Independent held.

A quick technical point before the post. Most of this post is written comparing Labor two-party preferred percentages by electoral division to Yes percentages at referendums. It could have been written comparing Coalition 2PP% to No% and produce the same findings. You just have to choose one of the two methods of measure, and focussing on the smaller number of Yes voting divisions is easier to measure and explain.
Read More »How Referendum Results Relate to Levels of Party Support

Vote by Type at the 1999 Republic Referendum PLUS how Referendum Night will Unfold.

Several times in the last fortnight I’ve been asked how I think Postal and Pre-poll votes will split at the referendum.

As a general rule at Australian elections, postal votes significantly favour the Coalition compared to polling day votes. Pre-poll votes slightly favour the Coalition though by how much varies from election to election. The smaller categories of Absent and Provisional votes tend to favour Labor.

At referendums, it is fair to say a No vote is for the status quo and a Yes vote for change. On that basis you would expect postal voting to display the same pattern as at a general election, favouring the conservative position. Pre-poll voting could also have a small lean to the status quo.

This observation on postal voting is backed by the chart below that shows the Yes/No percentages by vote type for the 1999 Republic referendum. (I’ve co-opted the common colours being used by Yes and No in 2023.)

As the column showing percentage votes in each category makes clear, the past two decades have seen a massive shift away from voting on election day. So will the same trends be evident in 2023? Here are a few important points. Read More »Vote by Type at the 1999 Republic Referendum PLUS how Referendum Night will Unfold.

The Voice Referendum – Postal and Pre-Poll Voting Rates

Monday 30 October – Postal vote receipt has now closed so this will be the final update. Returned postal votes represented 10.1% of enrolment, about 10.9% of votes counted. The final return rate for dispatched postal votes is 86.4%.

Saturday 14 October – final figures – At the close of early voting on Friday 13 October, 6.1 million pre-poll votes had been cast representing 34.7% of enrolled voters. A single day record of 1.1 million pre-poll votes were cast on Friday. Around 2.1 million electors had applied for a postal vote pack representing 11.7% of enrolled voters. Around 1.4 million completed postal votes have been returned. Returned postal votes represent 8.1% of enrolment or 69.3% of dispatched postal vote packs.

The final early vote figure is a record, higher than in 2022, but postal applications are lower than in 2022.

The post includes a number of graphs breaking down the figures by state and by electoral division.
Read More »The Voice Referendum – Postal and Pre-Poll Voting Rates

A Quick and Easy Referendum Voting Guide

(Update – the writ for the referendum was issued on Monday 11 September and you can now apply for a postal vote through the AEC website. The electoral roll will close on Monday 18 September.)

Over the last fortnight I have read several referendum voting guides that are over-long, over-complicated and in some cases downright confusing.

What needs to be understood is that the process of turning up to vote at a referendum is exactly the same as at a general election.

With one single exception – a different ballot paper is used.

All the options on when, where and by what method you vote are identical to last year’s Federal election.

In this post I am not addressing whether you should vote for or against the referendum. Every household in the country has been sent a guide to the referendum including the official Yes and No cases. The media and internet are full of information about the referendum and its consequences, though not all of the information is accurate.

In this post I’m trying to de-mystify the process with a simple FAQ about voting at the referendum.

Let me start with the only real difference in the process – the ballot paper and how to complete it.Read More »A Quick and Easy Referendum Voting Guide