The Tally Room

The NSW special minister of state, John Graham, yesterday announced that the government will ask the state Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters (JSCEM) to hold an inquiry into rates of eligible voters participating in NSW state elections, with a goal of achieving 100%...

Ben is joined by Kerryn Baker from the Department of Pacific Affairs at the Australian National University to discuss the recent elections in the Solomon Islands, which ended with a new prime minister, if not an entirely new government. This podcast is supported by the Tally...

9:31 - I'm going to wrap up my coverage of this race here. At the moment it looks likely that the result will see Labor and Liberal retaining the one seat they had going in, and the Greens winning a seat previously held by the...

Tasmania's upper house stands out amongst Australia's parliamentary chambers with the most unusual constitutional structure. It has single-member electorates - common for lower houses, but unique for a house of review - and those electorates are never all elected at the same time. Instead,...

I've got yet another chapter in the long story of Australians' changing habits in voting. With the final results of the Tasmanian state election, we can look at the Tasmanian trend. The last Tasmanian state election was held in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic,...

Prior to the Tasmanian election I produced a blog post mapping out the relative strength of candidates within the same party ticket in some electorates at the 2021 election. The maps showed which of a party's candidates topped the vote for that party in...

One feature of the recent Tasmanian state election result was a surprisingly small number of candidates reaching a quota on primary votes, despite the quota being lower than any election in the last quarter century. Just four candidates reached a quota: the leaders of the...

It's no surprise that the informal rate increased at the recent Tasmanian state election, but I wanted to explore how high the rate went, and what might explain it. Tasmania has a rule that voters must number as many boxes as there are seats to...

This is a message for the state of Queensland, who've now done this at the last two rounds of council elections in 2020 and 2024. For each council election, two state by-elections were held at the same time: for Bundamba and Currumbin in 2020, and...

When I was analysing the 2020 Brisbane City election results at the start of the year, I noticed an inconsistency. I've now identified that the same issue is true of the 2024 results, and I wanted to clarify what is going on. This issue only...