The Tally Room

The process of redrawing local council wards for next year's New South Wales council elections is now quite advanced, with the councils due for a change having mostly decided on draft boundaries and put them out for public commentary, ahead of an early October...

The Western Australian Labor government has been recently going through a process of changing the structures of local government elections in the state. The process involves the replacement of first-past-the-post with preferential voting (including with the single transferable vote where more than one councillor...

9:45 - All election day booths have now reported, and the Liberal primary vote is on 57%, and the two-candidate-preferred vote is on 70.6%. The turnout so far is about 48% of the total enrolment, with a substantial early vote yet to come. I'm...

Ben is joined by psephologist Henry Schlechta to discuss two issues of democratic reform in Victoria: the arguments around abolishing group voting tickets, and the implementation of single-member wards for urban Victorian councils. Sadly this isn't a story of Victoria improving its electoral systems...

The second draft of boundaries for the next Northern Territory assembly election was published late last Wednesday, and it's taken me until now to complete my analysis of the new boundaries. The first draft was made redundant by a large surge in enrolments in remote...

Australia's next federal election is due to be held by May 2025. There are redistributions underway for three states, but the other 50 electorates will not be redrawn. This has given me the chance to start work on my federal election guide, the first part...

Ben is joined by ABC chief election analyst Antony Green for the 100th episode of the Tally Room podcast to discuss the many redistributions currently underway around Australia: federal redistributions, state and territory redistributions and even local council ward redistributions. We discuss the population trends...

As a follow-up to Thursday's blog post, I wanted to look into the question of what would actually happen if the territories were granted a third or fourth Senate seat. It's easy enough to calculate the primary vote quotas in past elections. It's relatively easy...

At the start of this year I put together two blog posts looking at likely trends in how the redistributions might be drawn in New South Wales, Victoria and Western Australia, looking at how much each seat is above or below the estimated enrolment...

There was a lot of discussion yesterday after Senator Don Farrell, the Special Minister of State, indicated the government is still intending to expand the number of senators representing the Northern Territory, and presumably the ACT too. This is not a surprise. The government has...