How preferences flow between Greens and Labor
This blog post was inspired by some discussion about the race in the seat of Lismore. Labor candidate Janelle Saffin came second in 2019, narrowly outpolling the Greens, who had come second in 2015. Greens preferences flowed strongly to Labor, electing Saffin over the...
NSW 2023 – 2PP preference flows by party under OPV
In yesterday's blog post, I looked at how many numbers voters tend to fill out on their ballot paper. Today I'm going to look at how those preferences flow to the major parties.
The term "two-party-preferred" (2PP) refers to preferences distributed between Labor and the...
How people fill out their ballots in NSW
In this blog post I'll be analysing how much people fill out their ballot paper, and how it differs between parties and based on how big the ballot paper is.
For the next three blog posts, I will be using the full preference data published...
NSW 2023 – where preferences have flowed over time
The New South Wales Legislative Assembly has been elected by the optional preferential voting (OPV) method since 1981. Unlike compulsory preferential voting (CPV) which is used in most of Australia, voters are free to number as few or as many boxes as they wish....
Podcast #86: Introduction to the NSW election
The podcast is back, and Ben is joined by Rodney Smith from the University of Sydney and Michael McGowan from the Guardian to discuss the upcoming NSW state election. We discussed the election context and then focused on the prospects of minor parties and...
When local council parties break into state politics
During the most recent NSW council elections, I wrote repeatedly about how party systems for local councils are not the same as the state or federal party system. A different electoral system and different limits to the size of the polity tend to spit...
The non-classic dimension in NSW
There are 93 seats in the NSW Legislative Assembly. While a majority of these seats will be straight-out contests between Labor and the Coalition, a sizeable share of these seats are what the Australian Electoral Commission calls 'non-classic' - where the final two-candidate-preferred count...
Rise of the minor parties, NSW edition
I have previously written about the decline in the total vote for the major parties at federal elections and Victorian state elections, and there is also a story of a decline in the major party vote in New South Wales politics, although the story...
The starting point in NSW
As we commence the NSW state election campaign, there's a bit of confusion about how many seats we should credit to each party as a starting point. This is understandable considering that we've had a redistribution, a seat changing hands at a by-election, and...
NSW 2023 – rising preference flows deciding the upper house
When results are reported for the NSW upper house, generally there's an expectation that the primary votes mostly tell us who will win. That's mostly true, but at the last three elections there's always been one seat that went to a party that benefited...