The Labor Party won 56 of the 87 seats examined in the 2022 Victorian election, giving it approximately 64% of the seats. However, it received only about 37% of first-preference votes. This shows that the percentage of seats a party wins can be very different from the percentage of first-choice votes it receives. The five charts will help explain this difference and examine voting patterns in Victoria before the 2026 election.
Figure 1. The scatter plot compares all 87 electoral seats in Victoria during the 2022 state election. The horizontal axis shows the percentage of first-preference votes received by Labor, while the vertical axis shows the highest percentage received by a Liberal or National candidate. In five seats where both Liberal and National candidates contested, only the candidate who received more first-preference votes is shown. Most seats won by Labor appear below the dashed diagonal line, while most seats won by the Coalition (Liberal and National parties) appear above it. The four seats won by the Greens appear near the bottom of the graph. The size of each dot represents the combined percentage of votes received by the Greens and other candidates.Data source: Victorian Electoral Commission (2022).
In 84 of 87 seats, the candidate who received the highest number of first-preference votes also won the seat. This means that preference votes rarely changed the final election results. However, there were a few exceptions, including Hastings, Mildura, and Morwell. In Hastings, the Labor candidate won despite receiving fewer first-preference votes than the Liberal candidate. In Morwell, the Nationals candidate won despite initially receiving fewer votes than the Labor candidate. Similarly, in Mildura, the Nationals candidate won despite trailing independent candidate Ali Cupper in first-preference votes. Ali Cupper is not shown on the graph because the graph compares Labor’s votes with those of the strongest Liberal or National candidate.
Figure 2. Each column represents one electoral seat in Victoria, arranged from the seat where Labor received the lowest percentage of first-preference votes to the seat where it received the highest percentage. The different colours show the percentage of votes received by each political group: Labor is shown in red, the Coalition (Liberal and National parties) in blue, the Greens in green, and other candidates in grey. By hovering over any column, you can view the exact vote percentages for that seat. Data source: Victorian Electoral Commission (2022).
On average, 29% of first-preference votes in each seat went to the Greens and other candidates combined. However, this percentage varied across the 87 seats, ranging from 16% in the seat with the lowest share to 61% in the seat with the highest share. This shows that the level of support for the Greens and other candidates differed from one electoral seat to another.
Figure 3. The lollipop chart shows the 12 electoral seats where the winning candidates had the smallest margins of victory in the 2022 Victorian state election. The shortest lines represent the three closest contests, meaning the difference in votes between the winner and the runner-up was the smallest. The colour of each line indicates which political party won that seat. Data source: Victorian Electoral Commission (2022).
The closest seat, Northcote, was won by a margin of just 184 votes. All twelve seats shown in the chart were decided by fewer than 1,700 votes. Among these seats, Labor won 6 seats, while the Coalition won 6 seats. These figures represent the actual winning margins from the 2022 election and should not be interpreted as predictions of the results of a future election.
The close winning margins demonstrate that even a small difference in the number of votes can determine which candidate wins a seat. This also raises questions about informal votes, which are ballot papers that cannot be counted as valid votes because they do not meet the voting requirements, and whether the number of informal votes has increased or decreased over the years.
Figure 4. The two line charts show how voter turnout and informal voting changed in Victorian state elections between 1999 and 2022. Voter turnout remained relatively stable until 2014, after which it began to decline, while the percentage of informal votes generally increased over the same period. Both charts have vertical axes that start above zero rather than at zero, which makes the changes appear more noticeable. Data source: Victorian Electoral Commission (n.d.).
Voter turnout was 93.02% in 2014 and 87.13% in 2022, according to the Victorian Electoral Commission’s published figures (see About the data), even though voting is compulsory in Victoria. The percentage of informal votes increased from 3.02% in 1999 to a peak of 5.83% in 2018, before reaching 5.53% in 2022.
However, the increase in informal voting was not the same in every area. Examining individual electoral seats can help identify where informal voting was more common and explore whether there is a relationship between the percentage of people who turned out to vote and the percentage of votes that were informal.
Figure 5. The scatter plot compares voter turnout and informal voting across all 87 electoral seats in Victoria during the 2022 state election. The horizontal axis shows the percentage of eligible voters who participated in the election, while the vertical axis shows the percentage of votes that were informal and could not be counted as valid votes. The downward trend line indicates that seats with lower voter turnout generally had higher percentages of informal votes. The seats with the highest informal voting rates were all won by Labor, represented by red circles in the upper-left corner of the graph, while the seats won by the Greens appear near the bottom, indicating lower informal voting rates. Data source: Victorian Electoral Commission (2022).
Turnout and informal voting tend to move in opposite directions across electoral seats, meaning that seats with lower voter turnout generally have higher percentages of informal votes. The correlation between these two factors is -0.51. Of the 10 seats where 8% or more of votes were informal, all were won by Labor. Although the data show a relationship between voter turnout and informal voting, they do not explain why this relationship exists or what causes it.
Overall, the five charts highlight different aspects of Labor’s 2022 election victory. Labor won a large majority of seats despite receiving a smaller share of first-preference votes. In most seats, the candidate who led in first-preference votes also won, while voter turnout declined and informal voting increased over time. These patterns provide useful insights into voting behaviour in Victoria, although they do not necessarily explain the reasons behind these changes. As Victoria approaches its next state election in November 2026, it will be interesting to examine whether similar voting patterns appear again.
Seat results: The election data was collected from
the Victorian Electoral Commission’s (VEC) official 2022 results pages
for each Legislative Assembly district using the R package
rvest (Wickham, 2025). The collected information includes
first-preference votes, final results after preferences were counted,
the number of enrolled voters, voter turnout and informal votes. The
analysis focuses on the 87 districts included in the VEC’s main results,
while the Narracan district is reported separately by the VEC.
Software: The analysis was carried out using R (R Core Team, 2025) and several supporting packages. These include tidyverse (Wickham et al., 2019) for data manipulation, rvest (Wickham, 2025) for collecting data from web pages, scales (Wickham et al., 2025) for formatting values, ggplot2 (Wickham, 2016) for creating charts, and plotly (Sievert, 2020) for interactive visualisations. The report was created using knitr (Xie, 2025) and R Markdown (Xie et al., 2018).
Election history: Historical information about voter turnout and informal voting was obtained directly from the VEC’s official state election statistics page at the time the report was generated.
Definitions: Voter turnout refers to the percentage of enrolled voters who cast a vote, while the informal vote represents the percentage of all votes cast that were invalid and could not be counted as formal votes. The term “Coalition” refers to the Liberal and National parties combined, except in Figure 1, where only the candidate with the higher first-preference vote between the two parties is displayed. Both parties fielded candidates in Bass, Euroa, Mildura, Morwell and Shepparton.
The winner and runner-up in each district were identified using the VEC’s vote-counting results. When preferences were distributed, the final two candidates in the count were used to determine the winner and runner-up. If a candidate secured a majority based on first-preference votes, the winner and runner-up were identified from that initial count. In cases where the VEC stopped distributing preferences after a candidate received more than 50% of the votes, the runner-up was identified as the candidate who was in second place at that point.
Turnout in 2022: The VEC reported statewide voter turnout of 87.13% (Victorian Electoral Commission, 2022), calculated using a total of 4,394,465 enrolled voters. This total includes 50,506 voters registered in Narracan, where the election was unsuccessful and voting did not take place on 26 November 2022. When considering only the 87 districts where the election was held, voter turnout was 88.14%. Figure 4 uses the VEC’s published statewide turnout figures, whereas Figure 5 presents turnout data for individual districts.
Statewide first-preference share: The 37% figure mentioned in the title represents the percentage of first-preference votes that Labor received across the whole state, based on the VEC’s official 2022 election summary (Victorian Electoral Commission, 2022).
Accessibility: The charts use colours designed to be distinguishable for people with colour-vision deficiencies. Different dot shapes are also used to represent the political parties, making them easier to identify. In addition, each chart includes a text description underneath it and interactive hover details that display the exact data values.
Generative AI. I used ChatGPT (OpenAI, 2026) to improve the clarity and grammar of my written explanations and to help me understand R and ggplot2 syntax. I independently made all decisions regarding the data analysis, visualisations and final wording of the report.
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Victorian Electoral Commission. (n.d.). State election statistics. Retrieved 18 October 2026, from https://vec.vic.gov.au/results/electoral-statistics/state-election-statistics
Victorian Electoral Commission. (2022). 2022 state election results [Data set]. Retrieved 28 September 2026, from https://vec.vic.gov.au/results/state-election-results/2022-state-election-results
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