Types of Elections in Australia

Choosing the right process to collect and tally votes, whether from union members, as part of a political election, within a private association, educational environment, or sports group, can be complex and may depend on the nature of the decisions the voters are making. Examples of election types include Preferential Voting, First Past the Post, and the Two-Round System. Each might have pros and cons or be better suited to specific voting, nomination, and election processes.

Irrespective of the election format, the right infrastructure, such as high-performing union election software, is integral. It gives participants oversight, clarity, and confidence that voting is conducted properly, correctly, and transparently.

Understanding Varied Australian Election Formats

Part of the reason there are alternative types of elections is that the way officials record votes can depend on whether they are facilitating:

• An election process to appoint one, two, or several people to a board
• Voting with a higher ‘weighting’ assigned to some votes
• Group-based voting to select candidates for different positions or roles

The key is for election officials to select a process that everybody understands, where reporting extracted from union election result analysis software or demonstrating the outcomes of an election provides assurance that votes have been accurately counted.

A quick look at the history of union elections in Australia illustrates an underlying distrust and lack of faith in some voting formats. Therefore, election officials must put as much effort into picking voting software and systems as they do into monitoring the voting process.

Australian Political and Union Election Processes

The compulsory voting system is somewhat unusual, with turnouts of 90% or more that would be considered remarkably high in other jurisdictions but are perceived as low in Australia. Many other elections, including union, association, and private membership votes, tend to opt for a similar system because it is familiar.

Preferential Election Voting

As the process used in most political elections, Preferential Voting (PV) is common in Australia, also referred to as:

• Instant Runoff Voting (IRV)
• Ranked Choice Voting (RCV)
• Alternative Voting (AV)

Voters can assign a rank against the candidates they want to elect in order of priority, from one to three, for example; although, the quirk is that every candidate needs to be given a number for the vote to be recognized. Candidates or nominees in a PV election win if over half of the votes cast show them as the first choice. Otherwise, the process involves eliminating those with the lowest votes, transferring the votes cast for those nominees to the next preference selected by each voter, and so on.

First Past the Post

FPTP, or ‘Plurality Voting_,’ is used in some countries within their electoral systems, where voters select only one candidate from a ballot, and the candidate with the highest points wins when all votes have been counted. Because eligible voters have just one vote, they often use this strategically if they think their preferred candidate will not win by voting for somebody else they perceive is most likely to win against their least preferred nominee.

Two-Round Voting Systems 

Our final example of an election structure used within Australia is the Two-Round System, which normally involves two separate rounds of voting and two ballots. The structure can mean this type of election takes longer and is more complex from an administrative perspective but can be simplified to one voting round if a candidate receives a clear majority and can be declared the outright winner.

In other scenarios, the two nominees with the highest votes in round one filter through to a second round excluding other candidates, where voters must vote a second time to arrive at the outcome.