The electoral system of Australia comprises the laws and processes used for the election of members of the Australian Parliament and is governed primarily by the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918. The system presently has a number of distinctive features including compulsory enrolment; compulsory voting; majority-preferential instant-runoff voting in single-member seats to elect the lower house, the House of Representatives; and the use of the single transferable vote proportional representation system to elect the upper house, the Senate.
Constitutional Conventions in Australia are significant meetings that have debated the Australian Constitution. The first two gatherings debated Federation and what form of Constitution to adopt, while the following conventions debated amendments to the document.
A supermajority is a requirement for a proposal to gain a specified level of support which is greater than the threshold of more than one-half used for a simple majority. Supermajority rules in a democracy can help to prevent a majority from eroding fundamental rights of a minority, but they can also hamper efforts to respond to problems and encourage corrupt compromises at times when action is taken. Changes to constitutions, especially those with entrenched clauses, commonly require supermajority support in a legislature. Parliamentary procedure requires that any action of a deliberative assembly that may alter the rights of a minority have a supermajority requirement, such as a two-thirds vote. In consensus democracy the supermajority rule is applied in most cases.
The Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) is the independent statutory authority and agency of the Australian Government responsible for the management of federal Australian elections, by-elections and referendums.
In Ireland, direct elections by universal suffrage are used for the President, the ceremonial head of state; for Dáil Éireann, the house of representatives of the Oireachtas or parliament; for the European Parliament; and for local government. All elections use proportional representation by means of the single transferable vote (PR-STV) in constituencies returning three or more members, except that the presidential election and by-elections use the single-winner analogue of STV, elsewhere called instant-runoff voting or the alternative vote. Members of Seanad Éireann, the second house of the Oireachtas, are partly nominated, partly indirectly elected, and partly elected by graduates of particular universities.
In Australia, one vote, one value is a democratic principle, applied in electoral laws governing redistributions of electoral divisions of the House of Representatives. The principle calls for all electoral divisions to have the same number of enrolled voters, within a specified percentage of variance. The electoral laws of the federal House of Representatives, and of the state and territory parliaments, follow the principle, with a few exceptions. The principle does not apply to the Senate because, under the Australian constitution, each state is entitled to the same number of senators, irrespective of the population of the state.
The second question of the 1967 Australian referendum of 27 May 1967, called by the Holt government, related to Indigenous Australians. Voters were asked whether to give the Commonwealth Parliament the power to make special laws for Indigenous Australians in states, and whether Indigenous Australians should be included in official population counts for constitutional purposes. The term "the Aboriginal Race" was used in the question.
The Parliament of South Australia is the bicameral legislature of the Australian state of South Australia. It consists of the 47-seat House of Assembly and the 22-seat Legislative Council. General elections are held every 4 years, with all of the lower house and half of the upper house filled at each election. It follows a Westminster system of parliamentary government with the executive branch required to both sit in parliament and hold the confidence of the House of Assembly. The parliament is based at Parliament House on North Terrace in the state capital of Adelaide.
In Australia, referendums are public votes held on important issues where the electorate may approve or reject a certain proposal. In contemporary usage, polls conducted on non-constitutional issues are known as plebiscites, with the term referendum being reserved solely for votes on constitutional changes, which is legally required to make a change to the Constitution of Australia.
An electoral roll is a compilation that lists persons who are entitled to vote for particular elections in a particular jurisdiction. The list is usually broken down by electoral districts, and is primarily prepared to assist election officials at polling places. Most jurisdictions maintain permanent electoral rolls, which are updated continuously or periodically, while some jurisdictions compile new electoral rolls before each election. Electoral rolls are the result of a process of voter registration. In most jurisdictions, voter registration is a prerequisite for voting at an election. Some jurisdictions do not require voter registration, and do not use electoral rolls, such as the state of North Dakota in the United States. In those jurisdictions a voter must provide identification and proof of entitlement to vote before being permitted to vote.
The Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 is an Act of the Australian Parliament which continues to be the core legislation governing the conduct of elections in Australia, having been amended on numerous occasions since 1918. The Act was introduced by the Nationalist Party of Billy Hughes, the main purpose of which was to replace first-past-the-post voting with instant-runoff voting for the House of Representatives and the Senate. The Labor Party opposed the introduction of preferential voting. The Act has been amended on several occasions since.
Chapter VIII of the Constitution of Australia contains only section 128, which describes the constitutional referendum process required for amending the Constitution.
The Constitution of Australia is the fundamental law that governs the political structure of Australia. It is a written constitution, that establishes the country as a federation under a constitutional monarchy governed with a parliamentary system. Its eight chapters sets down the structure and powers of the three constituent parts of the federal level of government: the Parliament, the executive government and the judicature.
Suffrage in Australia is the voting rights in the Commonwealth of Australia, its six component states and territories, and local governments. The colonies of Australia began to grant universal male suffrage from 1856, with women's suffrage following between the 1890s and 1900s. Some jurisdictions introduced racial restrictions on voting from 1885. Such restrictions had been eradicated by the 1960s. Today, the right to vote at all levels of government is held by citizens of Australia over the age of 18 years.
Section 25 of the Constitution of Australia is a provision of the Constitution of Australia headed "Provision as to races disqualified from voting" and providing that "For the purposes of the last section, if by the law of any State all persons of any race are disqualified from voting at elections for the more numerous House of the Parliament of the State, then, in reckoning the number of the people of the State or of the Commonwealth, persons of that race resident in that State shall not be counted."
Section 13 of the Constitution of Australia provides for three aspects of the terms of members of the Australian Senate: the timing of elections, the commencement date of their terms and for the Senate to allocate long (six-year) and short (three-year) terms following a double dissolution of the Parliament of Australia. While members of the House of Representatives and territory senators have a maximum three-year term, state senators have a fixed six-year term, subject only to the parliament being dissolved by a double dissolution.
The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice, also known as the Indigenous Voice to Parliament, the First Nations Voice or simply the Voice, was a proposed Australian federal advisory body to comprise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, to represent the views of Indigenous communities.
Constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australians refers to various proposals for changes to the Australian Constitution to recognise Indigenous Australians in the document. Various proposals have been suggested to symbolically recognise the special place Indigenous Australians have as the first peoples of Australia, along with substantial changes, such as prohibitions on racial discrimination, the protection of languages and the addition of new institutions. In 2017, the Uluru Statement from the Heart was released by Indigenous leaders, which called for the establishment of an Indigenous Voice to Parliament as their preferred form of recognition. When submitted to a national referendum in 2023 by the Albanese government, the proposal was heavily defeated.
The Constitution Alteration Bill 1988, was an unsuccessful proposal to alter the Australian Constitution to enshrine the principle that each elector's vote should have equal value in Australia, also referred to as one vote, one value, including in states and territories. It was put to voters for approval in a referendum held on 3 September 1988.
The 2023 Australian Indigenous Voice referendum was a constitutional referendum held on 14 October 2023 in which the proposed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice was rejected. Voters were asked to approve an alteration to the Australian Constitution that would recognise Indigenous Australians in the document through prescribing a body called the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice that would have been able to "make representations to the Parliament and the Executive Government of the Commonwealth on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples". The proposal was rejected nationally and by a majority in every state, thus failing to secure the double majority required for amendment by section 128 of the constitution. The Australian Capital Territory was the only state or territory with a majority of "yes" votes.
