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Ben Raue
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Please try to enjoy each fact equally. Electoral analyst, find me at the Tally Room
I've added maps showing turnout, informal rate, the primary vote share for the winner and whether an incumbent was re-elected.
Generally turnout was higher south of the Yarra, and informal rates were higher where there was bigger ballots, in the north-west, Bayside and Casey.
39 of the 310 wards in these councils are yet to distributed their preferences, but in every ward the primary votes are counted.
A lot of these stats seem to revolve around ballot paper size - bigger ballots leads to more informal votes and smaller % for the winner.
You can also see it in this chart, which compares how many votes were lost by leakage out of the party ticket and how many were gained, throughout the distribution of preferences. Most of the cases where a party gained 0.2 or more of a quota were Labor.
So next up I looked at how many votes a party would gain in addition to its primary vote through the count, and average it out across all five electorates in each of the five elections. Labor does particularly well, in particular in 2018 and 2021.
This chart shows the number of wins for a particular share of the vote in each electorate at each election. The most interesting part is the range between 1.5 and 2 quotas - this sometimes produces one win, sometimes two wins, and Labor tends to win off a lower vote than Liberal.
Usually parties win fewer seats than the raw number of quotas they poll (after all, there is one extra quota per seat, so a 25-seat parliament has almost 30 quotas of votes). Apart from 2014, Labor has generally overperformed, in particular in 2018 and 2021.
This chart shows there is a reasonably strong relationship between the number of quotas polled statewide and the number of seats won, but it does look like Labor can often win more seats off a given vote (or the same number of seats off a lower vote).
Incumbency is a powerful thing, and this mechanism thus allows parties to avoid going into an election without an incumbent in a ward they hold. Instead they can have their incumbent retire in the final year, and their successor gets all the benefits of a council seat.
And what do you know, that is what is happening. Seven out of 26 councillors have retired in the last year, all triggering party appointments. All seven of those new councillors are now running for "re-election" as an incumbent. This includes Labor, LNP and Greens councillors.
This is a thing that has become much more common in 2020 and 2024. While by-elections were always rare (3/4 by-elections were caused by councillors quitting after winning a state or federal seat), it used to be common that councillors would just retire at the end of their term.
4 councillors retired at the 2008 and 2016 elections. But now that doesn't happen.
And this means that the average number of councillors per ward (a key metric of proportionality), also called the magnitude, has collapsed after gradually increasing from 2004 until 2019.
The Victorian parliament passed legislation in 2020, pushed by then-minister Adem Somyurek, which mandated single-member wards for all Melbourne councils (except City of Melbourne) and large regional councils. The rules were implemented for about half the state in 2020.
This change reversed the 15-year trend of moving away from single-member wards towards proportional voting systems using multi-member wards, but that trend has now been completely reversed.