Victoria Just Changed How Upper House Elections Work — Here's What That Means
On Tuesday 11 August 2026, Victoria's upper house of parliament voted 33 to four to get rid of a voting system called group voting tickets. The change takes effect right away, in time for the November state election. Victoria was the last state in Australia still using this system, which election analyst Antony Green said had allowed about 20 candidates over the past decade to win seats with under 6% of the vote, some with as little as 1% (The Guardian).
Here's how the old system worked. In Victoria's upper house, voters could mark a single "1" above the line for a party, and that party would then decide where to send the voter's remaining preferences — meaning which other parties the vote would flow to if the first choice didn't have enough support to win. That arrangement was called a group voting ticket, or GVT. Under the new law, voters who mark their ballot above the line must now number at least five parties in order of preference themselves. The Parliament of Victoria confirmed the bill removes GVTs and prescribes the new voting method (Parliament of Victoria Hansard).
The federal Senate abolished GVTs in 2016, and New South Wales had already done so at the state level. A Victorian parliamentary inquiry into the 2018 state election noted that distortions in New South Wales and Commonwealth upper houses diminished after GVTs were eliminated (Parliament of Victoria). An earlier inquiry from 2014 had stated that removing GVTs would simplify voting and prevent the distortions they caused (Parliament of Victoria).
Four MPs voted against the bill: Georgie Purcell (Animal Justice Party), Rachel Payne (Legalise Cannabis), David Limbrick (Libertarian), and Jeff Bourman (Shooters, Fishers and Farmers). Purcell said the changes significantly decrease her chances of re-election. She, Payne, and Limbrick had argued they would support abolishing GVTs only if the government also scrapped Victoria's eight upper-house regions and replaced them with a single statewide electorate of 40 seats (The Guardian).
That counterproposal was not taken up. The government instead opted for a targeted reform, removing GVTs while leaving the eight-region structure intact.
The legislation moved through parliament quickly. Anthony Carbines tabled statements of compatibility in the Legislative Assembly on 29 July 2026 (Parliament of Victoria). The Legislative Council debated the bill on 29 and 30 July, with speeches by Ingrid Stitt and Evan Mulholland (Parliament of Victoria Hansard). The final vote came less than two weeks later. The Electoral Matters Committee had recommended eliminating GVTs and allowing multiple preferences in a report dated December 2025 (Parliament of Victoria), and the government signaled its intention to abolish GVTs in a June 2026 Hansard record covering the Electoral Further Amendment Bill (Parliament of Victoria Hansard).
The broader context here is a decade-long debate over how fairly Victoria's upper house represents voters. GVTs allowed small parties to make deals with each other to pool their votes together, so that a candidate could win a seat even if very few people voted for them directly. Imagine a group of friends at an auction chipping in together to buy something none of them could afford alone — except in this case, the "item" was a seat in parliament. This produced results that followed the rules but struck many observers as democratically questionable. Green's figure of roughly 20 candidates elected with under 6% over the past decade gives a concrete sense of scale. The new system shifts the responsibility for directing preferences from parties to voters, who must now express at least five preferences themselves.
For the small-party MPs who benefited from this system, the change is existential. Purcell's assessment that her re-election chances have significantly decreased is a straightforward reading of the math: without parties directing preferences across party lines, candidates need more people to vote for them directly. The crossbench's proposed alternative, a single 40-member statewide electorate, would have made it easier for small parties to win seats because the threshold for election would be lower across the whole state. Its rejection means small parties must now compete within the existing eight-region structure, each electing five members, without the vote-pooling mechanism that previously amplified their reach.
The reform brings Victoria into line with the federal Senate and New South Wales, both of which moved away from GVTs after concerns about the same kind of vote-pooling distortions. Whether the November election produces a more straightforward relationship between how many people vote for a party and how many seats that party wins, or whether new strategies emerge under the mandatory five-preference requirement, will be the first real test of the revised system.
