The Tally Room

One of the truly sad things about the new local government legislation passed on Thursday night by the Victorian upper house is how it will send a wrecking ball through the independent and transparent system Victoria has used to not just determine ward boundaries,...

The single transferable vote (STV) is used widely in Australian elections, under a variety of names. Sometimes it's called Hare-Clark, but it's often just referred to as "proportional representation", or PR. We know no other kind of PR in this country. This method of voting...

This post draws on analysis in my chapter in Morrison's Miracle, a forthcoming book from ANU Press and Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia about the 2019 federal election. The Coalition gained an overall swing towards them at the 2019 federal election but it wasn't...

Victoria's Legislative Council is today considering legislation which would significantly worsen Victorian council elections by changing the voting system. The bill, amongst other reforms, would introduce a preference for councils to be elected by single-member wards. At the moment Victorian councils have a mixture of...

I've previously posted about the new boundaries for wards in 18 NSW councils. I have now finished redistributing the vote totals between wards in these councils - or at least those where partisan elections were conducted. In this post I will run through which councils are...

8:24pm - We got a final batch of postal votes and it appears we're done for tonight. Labor's vote has dropped from 51% to just under 30%, while the CLP has dropped from 31.4% to just 16.3%. The Greens have narrowly outpolled the CLP,...

I published my Brisbane City Council election guide at the end of 2019 and have been focused on other work since then, but I've returned to the topic to do an update of the candidates who are running, which I have published for you...

Another election in Queensland has been scheduled for the final weekend in March, with a second state by-election announced for that date. March 28 is already the election date for council elections across Queensland, including the Brisbane City megacouncil. It was also announced as the...

This post draws on analysis in my chapter in Morrison's Miracle, a forthcoming book from ANU Press and Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia about the 2019 federal election. Most seats in the House of Representatives at the 2019 election were still won by one...