The Tally Room

Last month I wrote a post explaining why I oppose mayors being directly elected by the voters rather than elected by their fellow councillors, specifically in the context of New South Wales local government, and precisely in reference to a current consultation in my...

Voters in three Tasmanian Legislative Council divisions are voting today for members to represent those seats for the next six years. I won't be liveblogging tonight as I have another commitment. If you want to follow the results live, I recommend you follow Kevin Bonham's...

Federal Liberal MP Stuart Robert announced his retirement this morning from his northern Gold Coast electorate of Fadden. I think this probably will be a less interesting by-election than Aston, but we'll see. I've published my Fadden guide here for anyone who wants to get...

As my final blog post about the 2023 NSW state election, I wanted to look back at how people cast their votes in 2023 - what method they used to vote, and how the results differed between those methods. I also touch on the...

Today's post is a follow-up to analysis I did of the recent federal and Victorian elections, looking at how the recent NSW election rates on measures of proportionality. The federal and Victorian results hit new highs of disproportionality. While the NSW lower house result was...

When you look at the NSW election results at the state level, there are some general trends that dominate when it comes to preferences. Labor generally benefits from stronger preference flows than the Coalition, with the Greens being the dominant party providing those preferences....

In today's post I'm following up on a pre-election blog post where I looked at what preference flow data tells us about the underlying political trends in the crossbench seats, now with 2023 data. I'm going to start with a chart looking at how primary...

Last week I analysed the final distribution of preferences in the NSW upper house election and thought I had detected some evidence that people were marking more preferences, but at the time we didn't have the full dataset of preferences. Now we do, and it's...

The final preference datasets for the NSW state election were published yesterday. These datasets include the full preference data for every single ballot paper cast in both houses. New South Wales is the only state to publish this data for the lower house, although...

The process of redistributing Western Australia's electoral boundaries has now commenced, with the first round of submissions closing next week. Western Australia's 59 electorates will be redrawn over the next few months, with the draft boundaries due out in July. The electorates in the Perth area...