Nominations closed on Thursday for the WA state election. The nomination information was published late on Thursday and on Friday night I finished publishing final candidate lists on my election guide.
The number of candidates for the lower house topped out at 398 candidates, an average of 6.74 candidates per seat. This is a decline from the numbers seen at the last two elections. There were 415 in 2021, and 463 in 2025.
The more interesting element is the number of Legislative Council candidates. My 2021 blog post points out that there were an average of 23 groups per region under the old electoral system. Nineteen parties nominated, and seventeen of those parties nominated a full statewide ticket. This produced a total of 325.
While the threshold for election is quite low under the new electoral system, the chances of election rely a lot more on accumulation of primary votes, and less on preference swaps and deal-making.
So this has produced a much narrower ballot – just thirteen groups plus an ungrouped column. That is just slightly more than half of the ballot width seen in the average region in 2021.
Most of the upper house groups also made a sensible choice to not flood the ballot paper with too many candidates. Without the silly rule in New South Wales which requires groups to nominate fifteen candidates to qualify above the line, five groups just nominated five candidates each, and another five nominated ten or less. Only Labor, Liberal and the Democratic Labor Party (bizarrely renamed as “Stop Pedophiles”) nominated more than ten candidates. It’s a bit strange that Labor nominated a full slate of 37 candidates when a repeat of their exceptional 2021 result would have elected just 22 members.
This is an encouraging development for the new system. Voters will have clearer choices, and a smaller ballot paper, even with the extremely high magnitude.
Elsewhere: Antony Green has written a helpful post with the historical data on the number of candidates who have nominated at each WA state election over recent decades.