Party registration points to massive Victorian ballots

The party registration process for the Victorian state election has now closed, with a massive field of 23 parties registered for the election. I believe this is the largest number ever.

The group voting ticket creates incentives for lots of small parties to form with attractive names. Preference tickets prevent issues of vote exhaustion or preference leakage which otherwise would encourage small parties to consolidate into larger forces. GVTs mean you can play the lottery and take your chances of winning a seat off a small vote.

Techniques at exploiting the voting system were perfected in the early 2010s, with the 2013 federal election seeing major breakthroughs in the Senate which eventually triggered reform prior to the 2016 federal election. You can see the effect of this shift on the number of parties which ran candidates for the Legislative Council in 2014 and 2018.

You can also see this trend in the size of the ballot papers for each Legislative Council region.

The average number of groups dropped slightly from 8.6 to 7.1 at the first two elections, then shot up to 16.5% in 2014 and 18.25 in 2018.

The chart also shows the range of ballot sizes across the eight regions. The ballot papers converged to almost all be the same size in 2018: 19 groups in the North and South East Metro regions, and 18 groups in the other six.

This is easy to explain in the context of group voting tickets. In the absence of GVTs, parties don't have much control over preferences, so preference deals only really have value if you're a larger party who can hand out a lot of how-to-vote cards. But deals become much more valuable under GVTs, so small parties have an incentive to run in lots of places to be able to swap preferences. So in 2018, twenty parties ran in the upper house, with 18-19 groups per region. Once you factor in that the Liberal and Nationals parties only ever ran one group in each region, this means there was practically no variation in who ran in each region.

This also has implications for likely ballot sizes in 2022. Even where parties haven't announced a full slate, it seems likely that most are aiming to nominate a full slate statewide.

Antony Green pointed this out on Twitter earlier this week, and says that, if the ballots are as big as party registration statistics imply, it will force the Victorian Electoral Commission to print double-deck ballot papers.

If all 23 registered parties contest each region, which usually happens when group voting tickets are in use, then ballot papers will be double decked, two rows of parties above-the-line, and two rows of party candidates below. #springst #vicvotes

— Antony Green - elections (@AntonyGreenElec) October 31, 2022

We'll find out at the end of next week, with nominations closing on November 10-11.

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