I wrote a blog post last weekend about how the NSW government has been sneaking in a change to how council vacancies are filled into a bill that is billed as primarily ending the privatisation of council election administration.
You need a quota to win a seat in a Tasmanian House of Assembly election. But in practice no-one polls exactly a quota. In reality, the final seats are decided by partial quotas and the distribution of preferences.
With a bit of a break in action after the federal election, I’ve decided to launch an Instagram account for the Tally Room. The account will have posts lining up with blog posts here on the website, as a bit of a taste of what you can read on the blog. I’m also interested in doing video previews for podcasts and video updates, which could potentially be posted on Tik Tok and Facebook at some point.
There is a bill currently before the NSW Legislative Council which makes a number of changes to how local government elections work in New South Wales. The bill has been referred to an inquiry that is currently open for submissions.
The trend of a falling major party vote isn’t quite the same in Tasmania as it is on the mainland.
While the major parties maintained their dominance for longer in federal politics, and in most states, as far back as 1989 we saw the Greens poll 17% of the primary vote.
Ben was joined by Tasmanian political observer Mike Lester to look at the state of the campaign and the announcement of candidates for the Tasmanian state election. We particularly look into the Tasmanian Nationals and the shadow-boxing around who takes the blame for the calling of the election and who has the best prospect of forming a majority government.
Nominations were announced today for the Tasmanian state election. After record-sized ballot papers at the previous election in 2024, they will shrink slightly in 2025. There will be fewer columns on the ballot paper, along with larger fields of ungrouped independents. While ballot papers will be smaller than in 2024, they will still be some of the largest seen in recent decades.
The three-candidate-preferred (3CP) count has become a topic of more interest in recent elections because of close races where the dynamic of who makes it into the top two can decide who wins. But it’s also an interesting statistic which can tell us more then is revealed by the two-party-preferred vote, while being a bit simpler than primary vote statistics.
There were 21 seats in 2025 where an independent candidate made the two-candidate-preferred count. For today’s post, I want to explore what we can tell about those voters from their other voting patterns. For voters who ended up with the independent in the two-candidate-preferred count: how did they cast their primary vote, and where did they rank Labor or Coalition?
The two-party-preferred vote is the simplest statistic we have in Australian elections – just two numbers that always add up to 100%. While it has reduced relevance for calculating the result in some seats, it still has predictive power and also plays a role as a sort of barometer of the relative popularity of the two major parties. Despite the increase in the vote for minor parties and independents, the choice of who forms government is still binary.