The Tally Room

The Victorian state government last week announced the final ward boundaries for 39 councils for this October's council elections. I've been compiling those ward boundaries as a shapefile and that's now finished. The VEC published KML files for every proposed set of ward boundaries. Unfortunately these...

Ben was joined by this week by Marcus Mietzner from the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs at the ANU, and the author of The Coalitions Presidents Make, to discuss Prabowo Subianto's clear victory in the first round of the Indonesian presidential election. We discuss...

We've known it's coming for about four years, but the Victorian government has finally implemented the final stage of legislation first passed in 2020, imposing single-member wards on all but one council across Melbourne along with many regional councils. Legislation sponsored by then-local government minister...

I have focused my analysis of the upcoming Queensland council elections on the City of Brisbane for a number of reasons. It is the most populous council in Australia, but it also has elections that are strongly partisan, with Labor, the LNP and the...

Nominations closed on Tuesday for the two Queensland state by-elections and the Queensland council elections, all to be held on March 16. I have now updated my candidate lists for my Brisbane City, Inala and Ipswich West guides. For this post I'm most interested in...

It has been looking more and more likely that Tasmania would be going to an election in recent weeks, with the premier, Jeremy Rockliff, demanding new assurances from two ex-Liberal independents and threatening to go to an election if those demands weren't met. Those two...

Ben is joined by Erin Cook from Dari Mulut ke Mulut to discuss next week's national election in Indonesia. We discuss the three candidates, the role of the outgoing president Jokowi in the race, the electoral system and the role of parties in Indonesia's...

To complete my set of election guides for 2024 and 2025, I've just finished my guide to the 2025 Western Australian state election. The guide features profiles of all 59 lower house races and the new first ever statewide upper house election. The 2021 Western Australian...

Earlier today I posted about the change in Victoria's redistribution numbers, with the ABS acknowledging an error and changing the projected enrolment data. I won't repeat all the background, you can go read about it there. The same issue has arisen in WA, although it...

Federal redistributions in Australia rely on two sets of numbers - the actual enrolment numbers at the time that the process commences, and an estimate of how many voters will be enrolled at a future point, about three and a half years after the...