As a follow up to last week’s series of articles on preference flows, I wanted to understand which voters end up in the two-party-preferred piles for Labor and the Coalition, and which ones exhaust.
So I took the two-party-preferred preference flows by party of first preference (as previously analysed in this blog post) and grouped them by the destination, not the origin.
Everyone including myself is closely focused on the NSW state election, but I wanted to draw a bit of attention to an upcoming redistribution, for the 25 seats in the NT Legislative Assembly.
Nominations were declared yesterday in the New South Wales state election. There has been a slight reduction in the number of candidates in the lower house. The ballot paper is slightly larger for the upper house, but the number of groups with a box above the line is down significantly.
There are 562 candidates for the Assembly, almost exactly the same as in 2019. This averages out to just over 6 candidates per seat.
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.