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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
6:57 – Just in case there was any doubt, the Liberal Party’s Simon Kennedy has won this by-election.
I will continue to liveblog but I admit I won’t be as diligent as I might be for a more interesting election.
With three booths reporting preference counts, Kennedy is on 73.2%.
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.
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.