Australian Senate

The Australian Senate is the upper of the two houses of the Parliament of Australia. The other one is the House of Representatives.

Voting system

The voting system for the Senate has changed twice since it was created. The original arrangement involved a first past the post block voting mechanism. In 1919 preferential block voting came in. Block voting tended to grant landslide majorities and even "wipeouts" very easily. In 1946, the Australian Labor Party government won 33 out of the 36 Senate seats (check). In 1948, partially in response to this extreme situation, proportional representation became the method for electing the Senate.

Related Topics:
First past the post - Block voting - Australian Labor Party - Proportional representation

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Senate Ballot Paper

The Australian Senate voting paper under STV resembles this example, which shows the candidates for Tasmanian senate representation in the 2004 federal election.

Related Topics:
Tasmania - 2004 federal election

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Electors must either:

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• Vote for an individual party by writing the number "1" in a single box above the line - this means the elector wants their preferences distributed according to a party's or group's officially registered ticket.
• Vote for all candidates by writing the numbers 1, 2, 3, through to the last number (in this example, 26) in all the individual boxes below the line.

Because each state elects 6 senators at each half-senate election, and the quota for election is only 14.7%, some states have upwards of 70 candidates on their ballot papers, and the voter must individually number every single candidate for a "below the line" vote to count. As a result the "above the line" system was implemented. Over 95% of electors vote "above the line".

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Note that the ungrouped candidates in the far right column do not have a box above the line. Therefore they can only get a primary (number 1) vote from electors who vote below the line. For this reason, some independents register as a group, either with other independents or by themselves, such as groups F and G in the above example.

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See another sample Senate ballot paper.

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