Labor won 56 of the 87 seats analysed here (64%) at the 2022 Victorian state election, from about 37% of first-preference votes. These five charts show how a result like that happens, and what it hides, ahead of Victoria’s November 2026 election.
Figure 1. Scatter plot of the 87 seats. The horizontal axis is Labor’s first-preference vote and the vertical axis is the Coalition’s. Labor seats sit below the dashed diagonal, Coalition seats above it, and the four Greens seats sit low on the chart. Dot size shows the Greens and other vote. Data source: Victorian Electoral Commission (2022).
In 84 of 87 seats, the winner also led the first-preference count. Preferences rarely changed who won. The exceptions were Bass, Hastings, and Mildura. Mildura’s final contest was between the Nationals and an independent, not Labor and the Coalition, so this chart’s axes don’t show that seat’s real race — only that the Coalition also trailed there on first preferences.
Figure 2. Stacked columns, one per seat, ordered from Labor’s weakest to strongest first-preference vote. Each column is split into Labor (red), Coalition (blue), Greens (green) and other candidates (grey). Hover over a column for the seat’s exact shares. Data source: Victorian Electoral Commission (2022).
In the average seat, 29% of first preferences went to the Greens or other candidates. Across seats that share ranged from 16% to 61%.
Figure 3. Lollipop chart of the 12 seats with the smallest winning margins in 2022, measured in votes in the final count. The three closest seats have the shortest sticks. Stick colour shows the winning party. Data source: Victorian Electoral Commission (2022).
The closest seat, Northcote, was won by 184 votes. All twelve seats shown were decided by fewer than 1,700 votes; Labor won 6 and the Coalition 6. These are 2022 margins, not a forecast.
Margins this small mean a handful of ballots can decide a seat — which raises the question of how many ballots don’t get counted at all, and how that’s changed over time.
Figure 4. Two line charts of Victorian state elections from 1999 to 2022. The top chart shows turnout, which was steady until 2014 and then fell. The bottom chart shows the informal vote, which rose for most of the period. Note that the vertical axes do not start at zero. Data source: Victorian Electoral Commission (n.d.).
Turnout was 93.02% in 2014 and 87.13% in 2022, even though voting is compulsory. The informal vote rose from 3.02% in 1999 to a peak of 5.83% in 2018, and was 5.53% in 2022.
That statewide rise in informal voting isn’t spread evenly. Zooming back in to the seat level shows where it actually concentrates — and how closely it tracks the turnout figures above.
Figure 5. Scatter plot of the 87 seats. The horizontal axis is turnout and the vertical axis is the informal vote. A dashed trend line slopes downward: seats with lower turnout tend to have more informal votes. The seats with the highest informal vote are all red Labor circles at the upper left. The Greens seats sit low on the chart. Data source: Victorian Electoral Commission (2022).
Turnout and the informal vote move in opposite directions across seats (correlation -0.51). Of the 10 seats where 8% or more of votes were informal, all were won by Labor. The data show the pattern but not its cause.
Generative AI.I used Claude (Anthropic, 2026) to review and refine the clarity of my written explanations and to provide technical guidance on R, ggplot2 and plotly, including troubleshooting code errors during implementation. I reviewed and verified the suggested changes, code and outputs against the underlying data and the Victorian Electoral Commission sources. The story, analysis and final visualisations were developed and directed by me.
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