Over on the ABC’s Election night I’m publishing a page that updates the Legislative Council result. The page also lists those who will be elected or might be elected, and also lists MLCs who did not contest the election or who have been defeated. You can find the page here.

The problem with using simple vote totals by group is that the WA Electoral Commission is only reporting totals of above-the-line (ATL) votes. Below-the-line (BTL) votes are being data entered, along with ATL with preferences votes, but no tally of BTL votes by group will be released until the end of the count.

BTL votes could have an impact, not so much for their number or preferences, but rather because the rate of BTL voting varies by party. The rate of BTL voting is much lower for the larger parties and higher for smaller parties.

So the current tallies that only include ATL votes over-represent the vote for major parties, and under-represents the minor party vote.

In this post I provide a table that tries to model the impact that the inclusion of BTL votes will have on the Legislative Council result.

Relevant notes on this table are –

• % ATL is the of % of total votes for each party at the 2021 WA Legislative Council election that were ATL votes.
• Uplift – this inverts the rate of ATL voting, dividing the total vote by the total ATL vote to give an uplift. This uplift can be applied to the 2025 total of ATL votes to estimate a group total. For example, if a 2021 party had 10,000 votes in total including 9,000 ATL votes, the uplift would by 10000/9000 = 1.1111. If the party ATL vote total in 2025 was 18,000, applying the 1.1111 uplift would give us 20,000 votes as a group total.
• The relevant uplift rate from 2021 has been applied to each party contesting the 2025 election.
• The 2025 Independents group has been given the ATL rate and uplift for the total Independent vote in 2021.
• Stop Pedophiles! Save Kiddies! has been given the ATL rate and uplift for all parties that contested the 2021 election but are not contesting in 2025.
• There has been no attempt to calculate an ungrouped total.
• The higher quota calculated using the uplift ratios has the greatest impact on the Labor total. Labor had the highest % of ATL votes in 2021 and so has the smallest uplift rate. Labor loses a significant proportion of its 16th partial quota as more votes are soaked up by the 15 filled quotas at the higher quota value.
• If that last point makes no sense whatsoever, let me try explaining by example. If a party had 105,000 votes and the quota was 10,000, the party would have 10.5 quotas. But if the quota was 10,200, the party would have only 10.29 quotas, a surplus of only 3,000 as an extra 2,000 votes would be needed to fill the 10 quotas.
• Adding BTL votes does something similar to the above example. With Labor likely to have fewer BTL votes, the extra BTL votes for other parties raise the quota, so Labor’s filled quotas require more votes and reduce the size of Labor’s surplus.

Here’s the table (Last updated 5pm AWST Tuesday 25 March) –

NOTE: I have re-ordered the table in descending partial quota order. The parties in the first few rows are those competing to fill one of the final three vacancies. A big caveat in this analysis is the assumption that parties will have the same rate of BTL voting as in 2021. I don’t know that. If the rate of BTL voting is lower in 2025, then the larger parties will do better than suggested below.