The Tally Room

Early voting commenced at the beginning of this week, and after three days it looks like numbers are very high in the shadow of the coronavirus pandemic. Postal voting applications closed at the end of Monday. 75,000 registrations were submitted in 2016, while about 370,000...

I blogged the other day about Victoria's system of independent reviews of each council's electoral structure (the number of wards and the number of councillors elected per ward). This system has existed for at least two decades, and over that time it has caused a...

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...