QUOTA NOTES
Newsletter of Proportional Representation Society of Australia Inc.

QN2025B           June 2025 www.prsa.org.au

Australia's 2025 general elections using
its long-standing transferable voting

Canada's 2025 House of Commons
elections using plurality counting

British Columbia's latest move for PR

List of Issues of Quota Notes

Australia’s 2025 general elections using
its long-standing transferable voting

Australia held a general election for the 150 single-member divisions in its House of Representatives, and for 40 members of its Senate, on Saturday, 03 May 2025. In the House, votes were counted using the transferable counting rules that had replaced plurality counting in 1918. The Senate count broadly used the PR-STV rules introduced in 1948.

House of Representatives: In the 2025 polls, Labor candidates won their largest-ever majority of seats in the House (62.7%, which is 94 out of the 150 seats) despite having one of Labor’s lowest first preference vote total in over 100 years (34.6%). Even though the percentage of people voting for candidates of parties other than Labor or the Liberal-National Coalition increased, the number of seats won by candidates of smaller parties or Independents decreased.

Three important points need to be made here:

· The principal reason for that distortion of the voters’ will is the single-member electoral system.

· Transferable voting does NOT increase the distortions of the single-member system, if anything the opposite. Transferable voting lets voters cast ballots for smaller parties without those ballots being completely discounted, as would occur with a plurality system, and

· The basis of Australian elections since at least the Second World War has been the concept of ‘2-party preferred’ and, in all but a few very close election results, the party preferred by an absolute majority of voters has its candidates winning an absolute majority of seats. In this 2025 election, Labor was preferred by its largest majority since at least 1943.

Transferable voting ensures the election is more representative of voters’ preferences than plurality counting. The increasing percentage of voters for smaller parties and independents shows a desire for an electoral system that better represents the diversity of views in our community.

PRSA Inc. undertook an analysis of the 2025 election for the House of Representatives that used the first preference votes exactly as they were cast in the election, and it made assumptions about preferences based on actual preference flows. The overall result would look rather like Table 1 below.

Group	Votes%	PR-STV seats %	PR-STV seats	Actual seats	Actual seats %	Plurality seats
Labor	34.6	40.0	60	94	62.7	89
Coalition	31.8	38.0	57	43	28.7	51
Greens	12.2	14.0	21	1	0.7	2
One Nation	6.4	2.0	3	0	0.0	0
Independent	7.3	5.3	8	10	6.7	6
Katter Aust.	0.3	0.7	1	1	0.7	1
Centre Alliance	0.2	0.0	0	1	0.7	1
TOTALS	100	100	150	150	100	150

   Table 1: Estimated 2025 percentages of votes and PR-STV seats

Australia’s present winner-take-all counting in single-member divisions can give MHRs whose party’s candidates win a landside of seats a false sense of security. The 3-seat majority in PR-STV seats, in Table 1 above, of the Labor Government over the Coalition Opposition should caution against any Whitlam-like Government over-confidence, as a small change in votes at the next election could easily result in a marked transition to Opposition, unlike the more stable PR-STV.

Using PR-STV, the single transferable vote system that is used at its best for the Tasmanian and ACT Assemblies, and to a lesser extent in many Upper Houses, including the Senate, would provide four very significant improvements on the current system for the House of Representatives:

· Every division would usually have MHRs from at least two parties, and in most cases at least three, sometimes four or even five.

· The last seat, and often the last two seats, would be contested in every division; there are no divisions where the entire representation is a safe seat; and no part of the country can be taken for granted.

· In every division, the governing party would either have representation or be competitive, and therefore there would be no areas where a government has no MHRs. That is unlike the present case where rural WA, rural SA, the whole Murray-Darling basin, and most of rural Queensland, have no government MHR in the House of Representatives, and

· Close to 80% of Australian voters would have voted for a candidate of a party of whom at least one would have been elected in their division.

PRSA Inc’s method was to divide Australia’s States and Territories into a total of 33 divisions, mostly 3-member or 5-member divisions matching the make-up of the House of Representatives, although that would also necessitate one 2-member division for the Northern Territory. See Table 2 below.

Area	Number of types of multi-member division for each State and Territory			Total number of MHRs for each State or Territory
	2-member divisions	3-member divisions	5-member divisions
ACT		1		3
NSW		2	8	46
NT	1			2
Qld			6	30
SA			2	10
Tas			1	5
Vic		1	7	38
WA		2	2	16
Total	1	6	26	150

   Table. 2: Allotment of divisions among States and Territories

PRSA Inc. normally recommends against using divisions with an even number of members, but the effect of the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918, including its Section 48 - given the much lower population density of the Northern Territory - has caused there to be an allocation of two MHRs to it.

Listing first preferences for each party, using data from the AEC website, PRSA Inc. calculated a quota for each division. In some, numbers were close, and needed estimates of preferences.

Consider the example from Northern New South Wales in the NSW worksheet here. After the completion of the first preference count, candidates of Labor and the Nationals would have one quota each, but the Nationals candidates were so close to two quotas that there would certainly be a second Nationals MHR.

That would leave the last two seats, for which it seems the second Labor candidate, and a Greens, a One Nation and an Independent candidate would have been contenders. The best estimate is that probably the last two seats would have been won by Greens and Labor candidates.

With PR-STV counting in multi-member divisions, Labor’s 60 MHRs would have been only 3 more than the Coalition’s 57 MHRs, but the Greens’ 21 MHRs would almost certainly keep Labor in Government.

The Society’s reasoning for the likely PR-STV result in each election is here. Its full analysis is here. Some illustrative graphs and maps still being prepared should, in due course, be accessible here.

Senate: The elections for half of the 72 Senate seats for State senators, and for all four of the Territory seats, were counted using the PR-STV method. They showed a much closer correspondence between the percentage of voting support for most parties’ candidates and the percentage of senators of those parties elected.

The Senate’s change to PR-STV in 1948 ensured that from then onwards there have been no more unopposed elections for House of Representatives divisions, not even in safe seats. The reason for that is explained here. Australia’s last unopposed House election, in 1943, in Hunter, NSW, was the fifth such election in that division since Federation.

Canada's 2025 House of Commons
 elections using plurality counting

Canada held a general election for each of the 343 single-member electorates in its Lower House of parliament, the House of Commons, on Monday, 28 April 2025. Votes were counted using the plurality counting that has operated since the House was first established in 1867. Table 3 below summarizes the results. Unlike many earlier such elections, the results were relatively proportional.

Party	Vote (%)	Actual seats (%)	Actual seats	PR-STV seats
Liberal	43.8	49.3	169	150
Conservative	41.3	42.0	144	142
Bloc Québécois	6.3	6.4	22	22
New Democrats	6.3	2.0	7	22
Greens	1.2	0.3	1	4
Others	1.1	0.0	0	3
TOTALS	100	100	343	343

Table 3: Canada's 2025 federal election results

Organizations campaigning to have that primitive plurality system replaced by a proportional system have been repeatedly stymied by legislatures reluctant to admit the injustice inflicted by the plurality system.

Many of the organizations, at both the provincial and federal level, have sought various proportional systems, some of which have been party list systems.

Such systems are indirect electoral systems, and allow defenders of plurality counting to very democratically point out that plurality counting, unlike party list systems, is a system of direct election of candidates.

Close result: A notable feature of the 2025 elections was the very close result in Quebec Province’s Terrebonne electoral district, where the candidate originally declared elected had won one vote more than the runner-up. An appeal resulted in the Superior Court of Quebec’s reversing that result, as shown in the final outcome in Table 4 below.

Transferable voting would have resolved that outcome far more democratically, by having the later preferences of the 13,575 ballots of the other four lower-polling candidates being transferred to one or other of the top continuing candidates.

Party	Votes for party’s candidate
	No. of votes	Percentage of votes
Liberal	23,352	38.741
Bloc Québécois	23,351	38.739
Conservative	10,961	18.184
New Democratic Party	1,556	2.581
Greens	630	1.045
People’s Party	428	0.710
TOTALS	60,278	100.000

Table 4: Quebec’s Terrebonne electoral district votes in 2025

The Longest Ballot Committee: In Ontario’s Carleton electoral district, the Leader of the Opposition, Hon. Pierre Poilievre PC MP, who had led the Conservative Party, lost his seat, but by a significant margin below the winner. The Liberal candidate that won that seat gained an absolute majority of the vote.

The poll in that district was nevertheless impacted by the involvement of a group, The Longest Ballot Committee. Its frustration with the inadequate and distorted representation of Canada’s single-member system led it to nominate enough candidates for the number on the ballot paper to reach 91.

Attempt to return: Mr Poilievre has said he will contest a by-election in a safe Conservative seat in Alberta Province on 18 August 2025 caused by the resignation of an obliging Conservative backbencher.

Attempt to foil his return: The Longest Ballot Committee has announced that it is working to nominate some 200 candidates for that by-election, as part of its campaign to replace plurality counting.

British Columbia's latest move for PR

Fair Voting BC Inc, which has long favoured PR-STV, alerted PRSA Inc. to the British Columbia Legislative Assembly’s establishment of a Special Committee on Democratic and Electoral Reform.

Its first term of reference is,

“That a Special Committee on Democratic and Electoral Reform be appointed to: Examine and make recommendations related to:

     1. increasing democratic engagement and voter participation, and

2. models for electing Members of the Legislative Assembly, including proportional representation and

         report to the House thereon by November 26, 2025.

BC’s unicameral 93-member Parliament presently consists of 47 New Democratic Party MLAs, which is a bare majority; 41 MLAs from the Conservative Party of Canada; 2 BC Greens MLAs; 2 MLAs from OneBC; and 1 Independent. The New Democratic Party largely replaced the former Liberal Party of British Columbia, which no longer contests BC provincial elections. Federally there is a minority Liberal Government. Liberals now have no MLAs in the parliament of its westernmost Province.

Strong popular support in British Columbia at a 2005 referendum on replacing its erratic single-member electorate system with PR-STV narrowly failed to achieve one of the two prescribed percentages in favour. Since then, BC governments have provided two further opportunities for change, the last being in 2018. Unlike that 2005 referendum, they presented voters with several confusing options, which resulted in an increased vote for the single-member electorate status quo.

Canadian reformers might have a better chance of convincing voters at any fourth referendum if they stressed to the Special Committee the importance of the direct election of MLAs, and showed how a Hare-Clark model of PR-STV would achieve that.

Advocates of reform should avoid baffling voters with home-made systems, or any form of PR party list system, as such systems cannot let voters elect MLAs directly. Reformers should concentrate on a single proven system that the governing Houses in Tasmania and the Australian Capital Territory have perfected and used with long-term popular support.

© 2025 Proportional Representation Society of Australia Inc.

ABN 31 010 090 247    A0048538N Victoria

National President: Dr Jeremy Lawrence     pre@prsa.org.au