How to vote in Tasmanian State Elections (Updated for 2024!) | AUSPOL EXPLAINED

Hello and welcome to Auspol Explained. I'm your  curly head host, David, and today's episode is all about explaining how to vote in Tasmanian State  elections. As always, this is not about who to vote for - that's entirely up to you to decide.  This is just about how to fill in the ballots for the House of Assembly the Legislative Council  and also why they are different. I personally think that the Tasmanian electoral system is  actually very interesting and it's different to how they do it in

other states so I'm just  going to explain a little bit of that as well. For the official source of information and up to  date information about Tasmanian elections go to the Tasmanian Electoral Commission website which  is tec.tas.gov au. Please check out their website if you have any questions that are not answered  in this episode or want up to date information. Speaking of up to date information: how to vote  in Tasmania has changed since I last talked about this in 2021! There used to be 2

5 members of the  House of Assembly now there is 35. Surprise! This only adjusts a few things. I'll get into it  but first: What is the House of Assembly? It's the lower house so the party or coalition  that gets a majority of seats in that chamber forms government. Most other states would call  this the Legislative Assembly or the House of Representatives if you're the federal parliament  - with the exception of South Australia which also calls it the House of Assembly because South  Australia

and Tasmania are secretly siblings. Elections for the House of Assembly are a maximum  of 4 years apart but they could be called early. So, how do you vote in the House of Assembly?  Well, first off you need to be enrolled to vote and if you haven't done that already you  can easily fix that by going to aec.gov.au and enrolling to vote or updating your  details if you've moved change name etc. And also a nice little reminder that voting  and therefore enrolling to vote is compulsory for state an

d federal elections in Australia. Secondly, when you go to vote at a polling booth or through postal voting you will get a ballot. It  is going to be pretty large. There will be a list of names of candidates in a vertical list, there  will be multiple columns grouped by political party, and there could be an ungrouped column.  There are five different electoral divisions in Tasmania. You can use the Tasmanian Electoral  Commission website to look up which one you live in and then research the ca

ndidates in  advance - which you really should do, one, because it's useful to know who you're voting  for but two, Tasmania’s system has a little funky twist that means you really should pay  attention if you care about who you're voting for. Now the thing is right, you are voting for  seven people. Seven people will represent your area or division. It used to be only five but in  2022 that was expanded. So Tasmania uses a system called partial preferential voting, meaning  that you don't need

to fill in all the boxes but you do need to fill in a minimum of seven. So  you'll number the candidates from one - your most favourite down to seven - your seventh favourite.  There will quite likely be more boxes. You can fill them all in, you can fill in just eight if  you wish, so long as you do a minimum of seven. Because you are electing multiple people if you  put more than seven preferences that means that your ballot can continue to be counted and used  for preference flows if not all o

f your original seven get elected, but if you don't put more  than seven then your ballot could be “exhausted” meaning that your preferences don't get  redistributed to anyone else. This is really up to you if you actually want to vote for more than  seven people or if you don't want your preferences to go to anyone else but that minimum of seven.  There's no group voting tickets in Tasmania. Your preferences are exactly as you mark them. But wait, there's more! Plot twist: Tasmania uses a thing

called the Robson Rotation  named after a man called Neil Robson. The Robson Rotation is where you randomize the order  of names on each ballot and that combats donkey voting. This is also used in the ACT.  In other states where a candidate appears in a lower house ballot is randomized and then  just printed on all the ballots the same way, but people donkey vote. Donkey voting is a thing  where you just mark the preferences in order of the candidates as they appear and just being like  “nya… I

don't really care. Bah bah bah.” It still counts by the way. That's still a formal ballot  if you fill in the right amount of preferences and therefore it could give a small boost of votes  to whoever gets the lucky number one spot. The Robson Rotation means that whoever is first on the  ballot keeps getting randomized and so if people donkey vote that's just spread out evenly amongst  a group of candidates and none of them benefit from it. So while you and your friend voting side  by side on a

cute democracy day out may have the same list of candidates to vote for because  you live in the same area your ballots will look different because of that randomized order. Tasmania also uses a system called Hare-Clark which unsurprisingly is named after two dudes  whose last names were Hare and Clark. They're very interesting but I don't want to explain  who they were. If you want to know more about them I'll link the Wikipedia article to who they  are in the description. The Hare-Clark syste

m is basically a mathematical way of determining who  wins in a proportional representation system and it's pretty similar to how we work out the Senate.  Basically, as there's seven people per division each candidate needs to reach a certain quota a  percentage of votes to win. Some candidates can get more than the necessary quota pretty easily  and so the excess preferences for those candidates are redistributed to other candidates at a reduced  value. Those with the least amount of votes are

then eliminated and preference flows continue  to be counted until we have seven candidates per division - and tada! I will link the equation in  the description to all those like math nerds who care about like numbers and stuff. Heh, weirdos! Anyway, let's carry on talking about the mechanics of an electoral system in a state that I don't  live in. Part two: the Legislative Council also exists. There are two chambers in the Tasmanian  Parliament and the Legislative Council is known as the upper

house. It's not where government is  formed but all bills must have the agreement of both chambers before they can become a law so the  Legislative Council acts as a chamber of review to further scrutinize and potentially amend bills. It  has 15 seats and each electorate is represented by a single member. This is interesting - to me at  least - because that's like the opposite of how other states do it. Normally the upper house is  the chamber with multi-member electorates whereas the lower hou

se is usually the one with single  member electorates. Tasmania did it the other way around and that's okay because I embrace  diversity. It's really important to note that elections for the Legislative Council aren't  connected to the House of Assembly. They could hypothetically be on the same date, but they don't  need to be, and almost always aren't. Elections for the Legislative Council are fixed. They can't  be called early but that doesn't really matter because they're annual, like they ha

ppen every  single year. Elections happen every May. However, the term length for a member of the Legislative  Council is 6 years. The way to resolve this is that it's got a rotating partial election.  One year they will have three seats up for re-election, and then two seats the next  year, and then three the next year after that, etc. And then it cycles through all 15 seats  until we reach the start of the hamster wheel of the electoral cycle and it's been six years.  So to vote in the Legisla

tive Council you really do need to go to the Tasmanian Electoral  Commission website which again, tec.tas.gov.au, and find which electorate you live in because it  may be having an election that year, you may have to wait another five. Got it? It's pretty simple  and so is the ballot for the Legislative Council. So, how to vote in the Legislative Council is  straightforward. The names of candidates are listed vertically. It is also partial preferential  voting so you don't need to fill in every

box though you can, like, no one's stopping you from  filling in more preferences. If for example there are 10 candidates feel free to fill in only eight  boxes and leave the last two blank if you find that they're both equally undesirable and you  can't choose which one is worse - or you just don't want to hurt their feelings cos you know  them personally and just don't think either of them should be in Parliament. You don't have to  fill in all the boxes just so long as you do fill in a minimu

m amount, which varies depending on  how many candidates there are. If there are more than three candidates which, let's be honest, is  quite likely, then you must fill in at least three boxes. If there are only three candidates then you  must fill in a minimum of two boxes. If there are only two candidates well, then you're allowed to  fill in only one box, but you still have to fill in one box. Again, that's just a minimum. You  can still fill in more preferences if you wish to ensure that you

r preferences are counted if the  first two or three people don't get elected. And there you have it! Thank you so much for tuning  in and a big thank you to the Tasmanian Electoral Commission staff for helping me make this episode.  I had a few things I wanted to clarify so I shot them an email and got a response really quickly.  They're actually incredibly useful. The Tasmanian Electoral Commission is your friend and I do  encourage you to reach out to them if you have any further questions or

clarification about  how voting works. They won't be able to tell you policies or who to vote for - again that’s  up to you to research and figure out yourself, but I do recommend that you do a little bit  of research ahead of time because looking at the various policy pages of candidates could  really help you understand who is going to be representing you and who you'd like that to be.  It makes you a lot more confident when you go to fill in your ballot. Enjoy your democracy sausage,  have f

un voting, and share this with someone else in Tasmania so they understand a bit more about  elections and are prepared because you never know when the next election might come round. It  could be called early. See you next time *clicks*.