In 2022, the Australian Labor Party received 37.0% of Legislative Assembly first-preference votes, yet secured 56 of the 87 seats decided at the November election. Its share of those seats was 64.4%. The distance between those numbers is the starting point of this story—not its conclusion (Victorian Electoral Commission, n.d.-c).
Victoria’s two parliamentary houses turn votes into representatives in different ways (Parliament of Victoria, n.d.). The Legislative Assembly elects one member per district using preferential voting. The Legislative Council uses proportional representation in multi-member regions (Victorian Electoral Commission, n.d.-b). This means statewide first-preference percentages alone cannot explain who ultimately gets elected.
Follow three questions: Where do votes and seats differ? Who experiences the biggest gaps? What does the resulting Parliament look like? A fourth ranked view then revisits the first-preference support behind the outcomes. Each chart offers a different view of the same election. Hover over marks for exact figures; use the controls to inspect details, and read the explanation beneath each chart for context.
This is not simply a numerical curiosity. In the Assembly, each district awards one seat to a candidate who wins after preference distribution. A party may accumulate substantial votes statewide without winning many individual districts, while another may win enough districts to command a much larger share of seats. Geographic concentration and preference transfers help explain why the statewide numbers diverge (Victorian Electoral Commission, n.d.-b; Parliament of Victoria, 2023).
The next question: Which of these differences are largest, and does the pattern look the same in the Legislative Council?
This difference across houses is especially revealing. Victoria’s Council elects members through multi-member proportional representation, whereas Assembly contests each produce a single winner. Their contrasting rules help shape the relationship between statewide first preferences and seat totals, although neither system necessarily produces an exact one-to-one correspondence (Parliament of Victoria, n.d.; Victorian Electoral Commission, n.d.-b).
The chart is deliberately selective: only the five biggest absolute gaps per house are plotted so that labels and comparisons remain legible. Parties omitted from this ranking are not excluded from the underlying dataset or the overall election analysis. The ranking describes differences in outcomes; it does not, by itself, establish that an election was fair or unfair.
The next question: After all these vote-to-seat differences, who actually holds the parliamentary seats?
Labor Liberal Liberal / Nationals Nationals Greens Legalise Cannabis Other seat-winning parties
The Assembly’s single-member structure can magnify a party’s advantage when support is distributed across enough winning districts. The Council’s multi-member arrangements permit representation by a wider range of parties (Parliament of Victoria, 2023; Victorian Electoral Commission, n.d.-d). Look for this contrast in the number and sizes of the segments, but remember that the two houses also have different total seat counts.
To keep this view compact, some smaller seat-winning parties are grouped as “Other seat-winning parties.” That label is a visual grouping, not a political party. Where the VEC data records Liberal, Nationals and a joint Liberal/Nationals category separately, this visualisation preserves the distinction instead of silently adding them together.
The final comparison returns to the ballot box rather than the seat count (Victorian Electoral Commission, n.d.-c, n.d.-d). Which party labels actually attracted the most first-preference support in each house? The ranked bars show the five highest recorded party vote shares in each house. This gives a clearer view of the underlying voter support behind the earlier vote-to-seat comparisons.
One election can support several different-looking but compatible pictures. First-preference vote shares describe an initial measure of voter support. Representation gaps quantify their distance from the distribution of seats. Parliamentary composition shows the final distribution of those seats. None should be mistaken for the others.
Across these interactive views, the distinctive story is not just that some parties received more seats than their vote share might suggest. It is that the same Victorian electorate chose representatives for two houses with different electoral structures, producing different relationships between votes and seats. District geography, preference transfers and electoral rules all matter.
A reader comparing only statewide vote totals would miss much of this. A reader comparing only seat counts would miss the contrast with first-preference support. The most useful understanding comes from bringing the two together—while being explicit about what each measure can, and cannot, tell us.
The takeaway: Votes measure support at the ballot box; seats measure representation in Parliament. The route between them shapes the political story.
The analysis uses official publicly available Victorian Electoral Commission (VEC) results from the 2022 Victorian state election (Victorian Electoral Commission, n.d.-a, n.d.-c, n.d.-d). The data were processed in R into a party-by-house table. All four interactive graphics were generated in R, using ggplot2 and Plotly, and assembled into one R Markdown HTML report.
Party first-preference votes ÷ total formal first-preference votes in that house × 100.
Seats won by a party ÷ seats decided in that house × 100.
Seat share (%) − first-preference vote share (%).
Scope. The Legislative Assembly analysis includes 87 seats decided in November 2022, before the later Narracan supplementary election. The Council analysis covers 40 seats (Victorian Electoral Commission, n.d.-a). Percentages use the corresponding house as their denominator, so each chamber is interpreted separately.
Selection and grouping. Chart 1 shows parties with at least one seat or at least 5% of first preferences. Chart 2 shows the five largest absolute gaps in each house. Chart 3 shows all seat-winning party categories but groups some small categories into an explicitly identified segment. Chart 4 ranks the six highest eligible first-preference party vote shares in each house and excludes the aggregated “Other Candidates” row. Consequently, readers should not interpret chart-specific omissions as zero votes or zero seats.
Limitations. Statewide first-preference percentages do not describe final two-candidate-preferred outcomes, exhausted preference processes, district-level geography or the order in which preferences were transferred. They are therefore not a complete measure of proportionality or electoral fairness. The VEC also records some Liberal and Nationals combinations differently between houses (Victorian Electoral Commission, n.d.-c, n.d.-d); these source categories should not be treated as automatically interchangeable.
Data validation. The R script checks that the party seat totals add to 87 and 40 respectively, and recalculates representation gaps from vote shares and seat counts. Party-level records should also be checked against the VEC’s published results before submission.
The charts use position and labels alongside colour. Exact values are supplied through hover tooltips; accompanying text describes the central findings so the main argument does not depend entirely on mouse interaction. The report is intended to be viewed as a single HTML page, including on narrower screens. Some detailed chart interaction is easiest on a laptop or desktop browser.
Huf, B., Reid, B., Tonkin, A., & Triscari, C. (2023). The 2022 Victorian state election (Research Paper No. 2). Parliamentary Library & Information Service, Parliament of Victoria. https://www.parliament.vic.gov.au/49950e/globalassets/sections-shared/about/publications/research-papers/the2022victorianstateelection_rp_2023_2.pdf
Parliament of Victoria. (n.d.). The two houses. https://www.parliament.vic.gov.au/about/how-parliament-works/two-houses/
Victorian Electoral Commission. (n.d.-a). 2022 state election results. https://www.vec.vic.gov.au/results/state-election-results/2022-state-election-results
Victorian Electoral Commission. (n.d.-b). Counting the votes. https://www.vec.vic.gov.au/voting/how-voting-works/counting-votes
Victorian Electoral Commission. (n.d.-c). Lower House overall results. https://www.vec.vic.gov.au/results/state-election-results/2022-state-election-results/results-summary/lower-house-overall-results
Victorian Electoral Commission. (n.d.-d). Upper House overall results. https://www.vec.vic.gov.au/results/state-election-results/2022-state-election-results/results-summary/upper-house-overall-results
I used ChatGPT to assist with Topic search and Rstudio tutorial and to mainly help with the writing format of the report, but I closely watch on current state and political affairs when I was back in my home country. The data that was provided has aligned to my favour so I’m able to do this assignment more insightfully and enthusiastically.