The Tally Room

The draft electoral boundaries for the next Western Australian state election were released overnight. One regional electorate has been abolished, making room for one new electorate in the outer south-east of Perth. The seats of Moore and North-West Central have been merged into a new...

The Northern Territory Electoral Commission published its draft boundaries for the 2024 Legislative Assembly election back in May, but that process will now have to start over due to tremendous enrolment growth in some parts of the Territory in recent months in the lead...

11:31 - I'm finished for the night. We are still waiting for the two-party-preferred figures from Helensvale pre-poll centre and otherwise have all the results we'd expect tonight. The 2PP swing is sitting on 1.7% at the moment. Really quite modest. I probably won't be...

Victoria is continuing the process of reviewing its local council wards, and since my last update in May, we have started to see proposed ward boundaries for those councils that are being forced to switch to single-member wards following legislative change in 2020 which...

Ben is joined by Kevin Bonham to discuss three upcoming by-elections in Fadden, Rockingham and Warrandyte, and for a brief update on other election news - the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters hearing on expanding the size of parliament, the potential for an...

Prior to the 2021 NSW council elections, I analysed the population trends in another of Sydney councils which have been shouldering the bulk of Sydney's population growth. I wrote about Camden, Blacktown, a number of other councils, and an overall post. Now as we get...

Ben is joined by Professor Steffen Ganghof from the University of Potsdam to discuss his book Beyond Presidentialism and Parliamentarism. Steffen discusses an alternative model of democracy he calls "semi-parliamentarism" which can gain the benefits of presidentialism in having a part of the legislature independent...

I've been using this quiet period between elections to get ready for the elections of 2024, and as part of that I have now published my guide to the 2024 Queensland state election. This will likely be the biggest election event of 2024, and the...

Ben is joined by former AEC official Michael Maley, who has just returned from a trip to Timor-Leste to help with the country's recent parliamentary election. Ben and Michael discuss the constitutional structure, electoral system and party system of Timor-Leste. We also discuss the...

New South Wales appears to be considering changes to rules around voting for the City of Sydney, replacing a special law passed a decade ago to expand the business vote in that council alone. Yet I would argue that this is not enough -...