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 Nationals candidate.
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.
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.
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. If a ballot paper is incomplete, the vote ‘exhausts’ once all of the candidates numbered on the ballot are no longer in the count.
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 independents at the election.
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 out different groups.
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 includes a minor party or independent candidate.
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 is not quite the same.
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 numerous MPs leaving their party to sit as independents or with another party. So for this post, I’m just running through those numbers to hopefully come to an agreed set of numbers.
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 from stronger preference flows – and these stronger flows usually flow in one direction.