In Victoria, your vote can help elect someone you’ve never heard of.
That’s because the state is the only jurisdiction in Australia that still uses group voting tickets (GVTs) to elect its upper house, the Legislative Council.
What is a GVT?
Under this system, voters can simply mark one party above the line on the ballot paper. If that party is eliminated during counting, the party – not the voter – decides how their preferences will be distributed.
Like preferential voting in a federal election, vote counting is done in rounds in Victorian state elections. If no single candidate has reached the quota of votes required to win a seat in the round, then the person with the lowest number of votes is eliminated. Those votes are redistributed according to the preferences of the voter if they voted below the line, or the party that was eliminated if the vote was above the line.
Sometimes this can lead to candidates getting elected who have only received a minuscule number of primary votes. The best example comes from the 2018 election. Here’s how the voting played out:
GVTs have long been exploited, with backroom deals allowing little-known candidates to leapfrog rivals with 10 times as many first-preference votes. But the 2018 election result was so egregious that even the political strategist Glenn Druery, the so-called “preference whisperer”, expected the practice would be scrapped as a result.
This is the central issue with GVTs and these preference deals – as the smaller parties get eliminated towards the end of counts, their preferences flow to each other. This can quickly accumulate and allow them to overtake candidates who received more direct support.
As a result, major parties can win fewer seats than expected, given their larger vote totals. And minor parties can pick up seats from extraordinary low primary votes. Such as in 2018:
The Greens MP Tim Read, the party’s spokesperson for integrity, says 20% of Victoria’s upper house in 2018 was effectively chosen via a “financially arranged cartel system”. He says this had serious implications early in the Covid-19 pandemic.
“The balance of power in the upper house – the final yes or no on legislation that governs our state – was being dictated by people more answerable to Glenn Druery than they are to Victorians,” Read says.
The Liberals’ leader in the upper house, David Davis, says the party also opposes the exploitation of GVTs.
“We always had trouble where a party that was patently of the left was preferencing a party of the right, and a party of the right was patently preferencing a party of the left and the risk that perverse results occur,” Davis says. “These are often not the results that the actual voters intended.”
Both the Liberals and the Greens called on Labor to act before the 2022 election, as did the government-led electoral matters committee in its review of the 2018 poll. But the system remained in place, with Druery working behind the scenes once again.
Progressive parties joined forces to create their own tickets to counter his influence. This included a “sting” operation by the Animal Justice party, whose candidate Georgie Purcell won a seat in parliament as a result of Druery’s deals, only for the party to direct its preferences to the progressive bloc at the last minute.
As a result, Druery’s tactics were less successful in 2022 and Barton, among others, weren’t elected. But the GVT system remains in place, ready to be exploited once again come the 2026 state poll.
So how should the system change?
Change may finally be coming. The electoral matters committee, in its 2022 election review, again called for GVTs to be scrapped. It ordered a separate inquiry, which for several months has been considering six potential replacement options. This inquiry, led by the Labor MP Dylan Wight, is due to hand down its final report this week.
Wight said the inquiry heard evidence from a variety of stakeholders, including political parties and psephologists.
“There were a diverse range of views in regard to what Victoria’s upper house and the way it is elected may look like in the future,” he says.
Guardian Australia has analysed each model proposed by the electoral matters committee using the actual vote totals in the 2022 election. For each model we first assigned seats to candidates whose primary votes exceeded the quota needed for a seat, then assumed those that were leading the vote would win the remaining seats.
This is a simplification, as things such as voting behaviour, candidate selection and even party formation would probably change given a different electoral system. But it shows the relative impacts of the different electoral models.
While momentum is growing to scrap GVTs, even within Labor’s ranks, almost all the proposals put forward by the committee would require a referendum, which both Read and Davis believe is unlikely before November 2026.
According to Labor sources, the most likely scenario is that the government would introduce legislation to scrap GVTs in the first quarter of 2026 while retaining the current upper house structure.
But this would face opposition from most crossbenchers, including the Legalise Cannabis party and the Animal Justice party – three votes in the upper house the government has come to rely on to pass its legislative agenda.
The Legalise Cannabis MP Rachel Payne described scrapping GVTs without replacing them as “self-serving” as it would probably “see Labor save a few MPs, the Liberals pick up a few”. She’s concerned One Nation would benefit most. Payne says to truly ensure proportional representation, the upper house regions need to be scrapped.
Purcell agrees, saying undertaking electoral reform “in the wrong order” would “sign the death warrant for some of our state’s most effective legislators”. She says abolishing GVTs but keeping the regions would be “fundamentally terrible for democracy”.
The government has pushed through several pieces of legislation this year and added an additional sitting week, while fewer are scheduled next year – perhaps in preparation for the frosty reception it will receive from the crossbench. Victorian Labor has also delayed its preselections in the upper house as it awaits an outcome on GVTs.
The Libertarian MP David Limbrick put it bluntly: “If GVTs were simply removed, I imagine the response from most minor parties would be to make the lives of the major parties as miserable as possible until November 2026.”
Ben Raue is an electoral analyst and blogger who writes about elections in Australia at www.tallyroom.com.au
