The Tally Room

Voters are going to the polls in the two NSW cities of Wollongong and Shellharbour to elect their local councils for the first time in over seven years. Wollongong and Shellharbour city councils were sacked in mid 2008, shortly before the scheduled elections in September...

Today Elections ACT announced new electoral boundaries that radically change the electoral boundaries used since 1995, and making very difficult or impossible for the Greens to retain all four of their seats at next year's election. I've posted analysis on the impact and maps of...

A friend recently referred me to an academic paper (PDF) produced by Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research at the Australian National University. The paper discusses the electoral system used by the Alice Springs Town Council (and all local government in the Northern Territory)...

Yesterday's political news was dominated by the announcement by federal independent MP Bob Katter's announcement that he will be forming a new political party to contest the next Queensland and federal elections. Katter has imaginatively called the party "Katter's Australian Party". Katter has served as...

The Tally Room has gone quiet for most of May. I have been working on other projects, including improving my maps and getting ready for upcoming elections. I'm planning on only blogging sporadically for at least the next month. In the meantime I have...

The election to the Welsh Assembly produced a very different result to that for the Scottish Parliament. Labour has been in power in Wales since the establishment of the Assembly in 1999. Labour governed as a minority from 1999 to 2000 and again from 2003...

The Scottish Parliament election produced a quite dramatic result, with the incumbent SNP minority government winning a comfortable majority, despite Scotland's proportional voting system. Scotland's Parliament consists of 73 single-member constituencies, and 56 members elected on regional lists on a top-up basis. Labour formed governments after...

4:32pm - I'm stopping the blog now, most of the remaining results will come in tonight, with the AV referendum results and Northern Irish results coming in late tonight and into tomorrow. I'll post again with the final Welsh and Scottish figures. 4:13pm - The...

Voters in the UK are currently voting in a referendum on electoral reform, and the results should come in tomorrow morning. Closer to home, some electoral reform is taking place in two councils in the Illawarra area south of Sydney. Wollongong City Council and Shellharbour...

The Conservatives will continue in government after yesterday's federal election, but the election produced a radically changed Parliament and political climate. The Conservatives gained a majority after two unstable minority governments, while the left-wing New Democratic Party reduced the opposition Liberal Party to third-party...