This is a message for the state of Queensland, who’ve now done this at the last two rounds of council elections in 2020 and 2024.
For each council election, two state by-elections were held at the same time: for Bundamba and Currumbin in 2020, and for Inala and Ipswich West in 2024. In both cases, one of these seats was in the City of Ipswich. Inala is mostly in the City of Brisbane, while Currumbin is in the City of the Gold Coast.
Prior to the election, particular concern was raised for Ipswich West. For those voters, they would vote using three different electoral systems at once. The state by-election uses compulsory preferential voting (CPV), the mayoral election uses optional preferential voting (OPV), while Ipswich’s ward councillors are elected using a form of bloc vote where each voter gets to mark two candidates equally.
For the other by-election voters, they wouldn’t have had to use a bloc vote system, but still would’ve been confused by different formality rules for council and state.
Queensland state elections switched from OPV to CPV in 2016, and this new system was first used at the 2016 Toowoomba South by-election. Since 2016, there have been seven state by-elections along with 186 individual contests at the two state elections.
Firstly, I’ve looked at informal rates since the start of my Queensland by-elections dataset in 1996.
There wasn’t much of a change in the informal rate with the change in system, despite it becoming harder to cast a formal vote. But the four by-elections held alongside local government elections were much much worse. The previous worst informal rate at a by-election was 3.9% in Brisbane Central in 2007, but the lowest informal rate at a by-election held alongside a council election was 6.5% in Ipswich West in 2024.
But what if we expand the sample size to look at all contests since the introduction of CPV in 2016.
The rate of informality often varies with the number of candidates on the ballot paper, so I’ve matched the ballot paper size to the informal rate. I have marked the four by-elections in question in red, and the other by-elections in orange.
These by-elections stand out like a sore thumb. The two worst informal rates seen in the CPV era (out of a sample of 193) were both by-elections held alongside council elections. Three of the top four were in this situation, and all four of these by-elections ranked in the top seven. Three of those high informal rates were in by-elections with just four candidates.
I am strongly convinced that voters are having more trouble casting a formal vote in these circumstances.
You can actually see this impact in the Brisbane City Council results, too. Inala covers the entirety of the Forest Lake ward, and that ward includes most of the population of the electorate.
This effect doesn’t seem to be obvious when you look at the ward-level results. Forest Lake did have one of the highest informal rates, but it was the worst ward for informal votes in 2020.
But if you specifically zoom into ordinary election day votes, Forest Lake has the worst informal rate of any ward. The average informal rate on election day for a ward was 2.6%, but in Forest Lake it was 4.4%.
And you can also see it at the individual booth level. There were eight booths in Inala. Seven were in Forest Lake, and one was in Jamboree.
There were 209 ordinary election day booths across Brisbane City. Of the ten with the highest informal rate, five were in Inala. Seven of the eight Inala booths ranked in the top 21 (in other words, in the top 10%).
I am not making a case here for OPV or CPV, although I am sure that perennial psephological argument will be triggered yet again. There are arguments for either system. I personally support systems that allow for OPV generosity when it comes to formality of ballot papers, but with CPV-style communication that strongly encourages preferencing.
I also dont’ advocate uniformity of electoral systems at all levels of government. There is always room to improve, and it is hard enough to change electoral systems at one level of government. Expecting all levels of government to move in lockstep would make it impossible.
But I think we can all agree that, as long as different electoral systems are used at different levels, they shouldn’t be held on the same day. We don’t hold federal and state elections on the same day. Queensland clearly has held these elections simultaneously as a way of saving money. But Queensland should invest in its democracy by giving each level of government a dedicated time period for campaigning and voting.
I am not aware of this taking place in any other state. Most states now use postal voting for council elections, so by definition it wouldn’t be possible. New South Wales could theoretically hold council elections alongside state by-elections, but they don’t appear to have done so, at least as far back as 1991.
There are also other arguments against holding elections simultaneously apart from electoral system clashes. Holding council and state elections on separate dates allows a separate focus on the issues and candidates for each election. I suspect council elections held alongside state elections would become much more dominated by state politics.
There are other countries which hold elections for all levels of government simultaneously, but that’s not how we’ve done things in Australia.
This is easy to fix – Queensland just needs to stop skimping on democracy and give state by-elections a clear window separate to council elections.