2025 Senate Notes Part Two

This is part two of a detailed review that I write after each Senate election.  See part one for a general introduction and coverage of proportionality, winning vote shares, preferencing impacts and the curse of Inclusive Gregory.  This part covers Senate 2PP, How to Vote cards, just-voting-1, exhaust, informals, below the lines, and poor performances.

Senate 2PP

Senate 2PP is useful especially for looking at personal votes in the House of Representatives - how an MP does in Reps 2PP relative to their party's Senate 2PP in similar seats may give an insight into how popular they are.  I determine Senate 2PP by adding the above-the-line two-party preferred vote between the two major parties to the below-the-line two-candidate preferred vote between the lead candidates of the two parties.  It has only been a useful measure to calculate since Group Ticket Voting was abolished.

Because preferences in the Senate are semi-optional, Senate 2PP can tend to amplify a clear winner because of exhausted votes, and it also tends to favour Labor in that the 2PP exhaust rate off Greens votes is very low compared to other parties.  The previous election Senate 2PPs were: 2016 50.08 to Labor,  2019 52.66 to Coalition and 2022 52.93 to ALP.  At this election Labor won the Senate 2PP 56.76-43.24, a 3.83% swing.

NSW 56.54 (+5.34)
Vic 57.13 (+1.21)
Qld 52.12 (+4.55)
WA 58.16 (+0.96)
SA 60.42 (+6.67)
Tas 64.00 (+8.96)
ACT 72.34 (+6.00)
NT 54.97 (+2.16)

Senate 2PP doesn't gauge the performance of other parties; thus Labor won three seats in Victoria with a lower 2PP than WA where it missed out.

Labor won the Senate 2PP in the 94 seats it won in the Reps, the six seats where it is known to have won the Reps 2PP without winning the seat (Clark, Fowler, Mayo, Wentworth, Warringah and Ryan), and eleven seats where it did not win (or in the case of Bradfield, may or may not have won) the 2PP: Bradfield, Berowra, Lindsay, Bowman, Longman, Canning, Curtin, La Trobe, Forrest, Kooyong and Casey (the last three only after adding below the lines), for a total of 111 seats.

How To Vote Cards

Much is made of Senate how to vote cards but not that many major party voters follow them and hardly any minor party voters do. Nonetheless getting onto a major party how to vote card can bolster a minor party's success if that major party's third candidate gets excluded, especially if the surplus is substantial.

Measuring how well how to vote cards are followed is often difficult because of local variants and undocumented changes.  I kept records of some Labor variants in Qld, NSW and Victoria.  For well-known parties the variants are often obvious, but for lesser-known parties they can be hard to spot.  

The numbers are the proportion of above the line votes for the party that copied the card (or one of the cards where there were variants).  This in general slightly overestimates how many of the party's voters as a whole copied the card, but the overestimates become larger in the states with high BTL rates (Tasmania and ACT) and for certain parties (especially the Greens).  

Overall in the mainland states 16-20% of Labor above the line voters, 25-31% of Coalition voters and 8-13% of Greens voters copied the cards.  The Coalition rates are similar to 2022, Labor and the Greens lower, One Nation higher but stil very low, and Trumpet of Patriots much lower than United Australia in 2022.  Follow rates for left micro-parties were negligible (especially Legalise Cannabis whose card was followed by two voters in NT and four in Tasmania, I suspect these cards were not widely available).  However Gerard Rennick People First had quite high follow rates, as did Australian Christians in Western Australia.

It seems that non-party how to vote cards, especially on the minor right, may have more influence than those of minor parties!  In NSW over 13000 - this is most of Warwick Stacey's victory margin though many of those voters would have preferenced One Nation anyway - copied a how to vote card issued by a website called Turning Point.  Recommendations by Topher Field were also copied by over 1000 voters in each of NSW and Victoria.  

The Coalition's how to vote cards have been blamed for the narrow victories by One Nation in New South Wales and Western Australia, but the number of voters following these cards was below the victory margin in both cases.  In WA had the Liberal card recommended preferences to Labor, Labor would have won, but that was never going to happen, the question was only were One Nation on or off.  In NSW the Coalition's surplus was only 0.045 quotas of which at most 0.0115 quotas followed the how to vote card; One Nation's victory margin was 0.0243 quotas.  In WA both the Liberal and National how to vote card votes passed on to One Nation following the Liberal surplus on National preferences.  The value of the surplus was 0.138Q.  However the surplus included at least 495,000 ballot papers of which at most 124,249 copied either Liberal or National how to vote card even after including cases that juggled the two (and the WA Nationals aren't really part of the Coalition anyway), which is at most 25.1% of the surplus (0.0346 Q).  Tyron Whitten won by slightly more than that, 0.0362 Q.   

Of course, one can say that publicity about the Coalition's decision to preference One Nation had an educative impact on the choices of voters who didn't follow the Coalition's how to vote card, but it can also be argued that that decision by the Coalition damaged their vote reducing what they had to pass on at any rate.  These things are unknowable unknowns - what is clear is that voters who preferenced One Nation by following a Coalition card could have omitted them and One Nation would still have won both seats.  

I mention in passing that while researching how to vote card orders I discovered a depressing example of gimmick party name voting.  In NSW of those voters voting above the line 1 Legalise Cannabis 2 Animal Justice Party, the most popular choice for 3 by far, with 21.6% of such votes, was Family First!

Just Voting 1

If a voter numbers just one box above the line their vote, while contrary to the instructions, is saved by the savings provisions and counts for the party they have chosen only. Here are the percentages of just-1 votes at this election (percentages are the share of just-1s out of all votes, whether ATL or BTL):

The 1-only rate rose modestly in NSW but was still lower than in 2019 where there had recently been a state election; everywhere else it was unchanged or fell except for ACT where there was a rise in Liberal just-1s.  (In 2022 the Liberals actually issued a just-1 card; this time their card was open.)

As in 2019 the lowest just-1 divisions were Franklin (0.76%), Clark (0.80%) and Ryan (0.82%) but again as in both 2019 and 2022 Ryan had the lowest proportion of ATLs as just-1s because of Tasmania's higher below the line rate.

Exhaust

Impressively, the rate of vote value exhaust at this election fell from 5.7% in 2022 to 4.0% this year, the lowest level since Senate reform! An increase in voters numbering beyond six boxes and the Coalition including One Nation on its how to vote cards are among the factors here, rogether with reductions in the number of party columns.  Exhaust increased from 4.4% to 5.8% in Queensland where a final seat contest of One Nation vs Gerard Rennick may not have been of interest to many left voters, but it fell from 6.3 to 3.4 in NSW, 6.9 to 4.5 in Victoria, 5.7 to 3.5 in WA, 6.6 to 2.6 in SA, 3.4 to 1.9 in Tasmania, 1.8 to 0.1 in ACT and 0.5 to 0.1 in NT.  (Exhaust in the Territories is highly dependent on how quickly people get elected.)

Informal Votes

Informal voting rose slightly in the Reps at this election (up 0.41% to 5.6% which is too high) and I will have more to say about the Werriwa and Watson disasters on that front in due course.    It's clear some seats just cannot cope with having more than seven candidates.  In the Senate however the informal rate was largely static, rising 0.03% to 3.45% with small increases in NSW and SA and small declines in Victoria and WA.

Below the lines

Prior to this election I saw a fair bit of nonsense on social media with various accounts banging on about the supposed need for voters to vote below the line to control their own preferences.  Much of this was coming from people who didn't seem to understand that "the line" applied to the Senate only, and what some really seemed to mean was that one shouldn't follow how to vote cards.  While it is useful for some people to vote below the line, for most it's completely unnecessary, and the message that preference harvesting is dead in Senate elections is increasingly getting out there. At this election voting below the line fell in every race, and fell to its lowest level since Senate reform in all races except ACT.

The 2025 race was the first that lacked significant below the line campaigns for individual candidates.  In Tasmania, Lisa Singh and Richard Colbeck (2016), Singh again (2019) and Eric Abetz (2022) had been prominent BTL candidates while in 2019 there was a large Jim Molan BTL push in NSW.  This election, nothing really to see.  

Last!

Last and best, the bit about dud performances!  

Australia's lowest scoring Senate candidate both by raw votes and percentage was Kirti Alle (Group T, Vic) with 29 votes (0.00071%) however that is nonetheless again the highest such score since the 1984 introduction of above the line boxes.  

Group T in Victoria was also the worst performed group with an above the line box, polling 0.05%.  Generally obscure non-party groups (of which there were thankfully few this election) poll poorly.  But plenty of recognised parties did poorly too.  The most consistent tailender was Australian Citizens which failed to reach 0.4% in any state and finished last among the named party groups everywhere except Western Australia (where it beat Socialist Alliance and FUSION).  FUSION didn't crack 0.5% at four attempts, nor Australian Democrats at three, and Socialist Alliance, Indigenous-Aboriginal, Great Australians and Australia's Voice all failed to get 1% in a single state.  Sustainable Australia somehow managed 1.2% in Tasmania (the donkey vote and the lack of choice on the left of the Tasmanian ballot would have helped there) but didn't get 0.5% in any other states.  The Libertarians also did far worse than under their old Liberal Democrats name, except in NSW where their joint ticket with GRPF and HEART held most of their previous vote.  

The issue of who below-the-line voters put last on their ballots if voting all the way through wasn't the same this year without Eric Abetz and Zed Seselja but for what it's worth the bottom-most Trumpet of Patriots candidates scored the most BTL lasts in every state except Queensland, which stopped a perfect sweep by giving the raspberry to the lowest Green.  The last One Nation and Libertarian candidates in NT and ACT respectively had the most BTL lasts in the absence of TOP.

A special dud performance award must surely go to the Liberals for their result in the ACT (I'm not saying it should go specifically to the Canberra Liberals either, it was far from being solely their faulr).  After Zed Seselja lost in 2022 there was some speculation the Liberals might be able to get their seat back if David Pocock took enough votes off Labor (and not, that said, on any kind of merit).  But the Canberra Liberals' campaign was disastrous, with the preselected candidate being accused of branch-stacking, which led to a vote by preselectors on whether to sack him, with 40% supporting doing so but he still continued.  Worse was to come in the campaign in the form of the federal Liberals' proposed public service cuts, which their candidate ended up trying to run against.  

Not only did the ACT Liberals lose the Senate 2PP to Labor 72.3-27.7 but they lost the 2CP to David Pocock even more heavily (75.6-24.4) and to the Greens (60.4-39.6), and even to ... the Animal Justice Party! (50.06-49.94).  (They did ward off Sustainable Australia by a massive 50.6-49.4, and we've seen above how Sustainable Australia went elsewhere!)

Yes it's Canberra, I know, but it's always been Canberra, and the Liberals have lost 45% of their primary vote in two cycles!  Had either Pocock or Labor not stood the Liberals still would not have won a seat in the ACT  Their performance here was so bad that it's not immediately obvious that they would have got a seat if there were four seats up for grabs.  (I believe they would thanks especially to below the line leakage from Pocock and Gallagher, but it's tricky enough to require detailed simulation - I'll add a firmer note on that when able.)  

I also mention that the Tasmanian Liberals' Senate performance was so bad that they lost the Senate 2CP vs Jacqui Lambie Network narrowly in every division, having never lost it in a single division before - but at least they managed to save their second seat with some breathing space in the end.  

That's all for another incredible Senate election, one that I wished I'd been able to do something closer to justice to in the postcount phase but the Reps was just far too distracting!  Huge thanks again to David Barry for his Senate Preference Explorer,  Andrew Conway for his ConcreteSTV Server, which allows simulations of outcomes with candidates removed or rules changed, and to the ABC for their archiving of most of the Senate How To Vote Cards.  Responsibility for any errors in using these fine tools is mine.