I’ve got yet another chapter in the long story of Australians’ changing habits in voting. With the final results of the Tasmanian state election, we can look at the Tasmanian trend. The last Tasmanian state election was held in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, and saw a big increase in pre-poll votes, and a slight increase in postal votes. The 2024 result didn’t see any reversion to pre-COVID trends. Instead there was a slight continuation. Ordinary voting dropped from 66.5% to 64%, and there was also a drop in the out of division votes from 5.1% to 4.2%. That means the election day vote d ..read more

Prior to the Tasmanian election I produced a blog post mapping out the relative strength of candidates within the same party ticket in some electorates at the 2021 election. The maps showed which of a party’s candidates topped the vote for that party in each booth in a particular electorate. Today’s post is an update of that post, based on the 2024 results. There was a number of electorates where a clear story is told when you plot the booth results for a party’s candidates. This table shows the relative strength of each candidate in a party’s ticket. Generally the first- and second-ranked ca ..read more

One feature of the recent Tasmanian state election result was a surprisingly small number of candidates reaching a quota on primary votes, despite the quota being lower than any election in the last quarter century. Just four candidates reached a quota: the leaders of the Liberal, Labor and Greens parties, and deputy premier Michael Ferguson. Now that I have the final figures (and have grabbed some older data) I have been able to track how this compares to past elections, and have found that 2024 was indeed a bit unique. In this blog post I’m going to explore how votes are concentrated with th ..read more

It’s no surprise that the informal rate increased at the recent Tasmanian state election, but I wanted to explore how high the rate went, and what might explain it. Tasmania has a rule that voters must number as many boxes as there are seats to be filled. That was seven up until 1996, five from 1998 until 2021, and then seven again this year. In part to match this rule, the three biggest parties each run seven candidates in each electorate, even though they would never have a chance of winning all seven. It means that a voter can number 1 to 7 just within their group and those preferences will ..read more

When I was analysing the 2020 Brisbane City election results at the start of the year, I noticed an inconsistency. I’ve now identified that the same issue is true of the 2024 results, and I wanted to clarify what is going on. This issue only affects the lord mayoral results. In short, there’s approximately 100,000 votes (about 14.2% of the total) which have been reported in the incorrect ward. This is because votes cast outside of a voter’s home ward have simply been counted at that booth, rather than being counted as absent votes in the home ward. Firstly, it’s worth clarifying the typical pr ..read more

Now that we have the final results for the Brisbane City Council election, we can assess how people chose to cast their votes, and how that fits into the historical trend. A slow decline in election-day voting accelerated dramatically in 2020, with the election held in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. There was some bounceback in election-day voting in 2024, but this wasn’t due to a decline in pre-poll voting. Indeed a new record was set, with the number of pre-poll votes slightly exceeding the 2020 figure. This chart shows the vote type figures as a share of turnout, not a share of e ..read more

9:06 – I’m going to wrap up here. This was a very comfortable Liberal victory, with a primary vote currently sitting on 62.7%. 8:28 – They have finished counting the primary votes for all election-day and pre-poll booths, and the Liberal Party is on 62.6% of the primary vote, with the Greens second on 16.7%. They don’t appear to have counted any postal votes yet, and the turnout is on 74.4%. I would thus expect the turnout to be in the low 80s, which would be at the lower end of by-election turnouts in the last decade but not particularly remarkable. Of the 14 by-elections held between 2017 an ..read more

Nominations have been declared for three Tasmanian Legislative Council elections, with polling day on May 4. Tasmania’s upper house is never fully dissolved, with two or three of the fifteen electorates up for election each year over a six-year cycle. This year, the seat of Hobart and the south-eastern rural seat of Prosser are due. The northern Hobart seat of Elwick will also hold a by-election to fill the last four years of Josh Willie’s term after his successful moving to the lower house. The most interesting thing about these elections is the total lack of incumbents. Willie and Prosser ML ..read more

Now that we have the final voting figures for the City of Brisbane, it was possible to update the analysis of preference flows and the impact of optional preferential voting (OPV) that I published prior to the election. Immediately after the election, it became clear that there had been an increase in the proportion of Greens preferences flowing to Labor and vice versa at the 2024 election, compared to the 2020 council election. For this blog post I am comparing the 3CP figures in wards where the final three candidates were LNP, Greens and Labor (which was in 24 out of 26 wards in 2024) to the ..read more

I have been spending the last few weeks adding a bunch of extra data to the Tally Room data repository, This repository contains tidy data for state and local elections that I have found useful for my data analysis. Often this data is published in a less tidy format, and some bits of information can actually be hard to find online (such as lists of polling place addresses along with geocoding, which is necessary for mapping). I’ve also included results of federal by-elections and pre-2023 referendums. The repository is now quite large. I have published a portion of the repository for anyone to ..read more