A
small but significant follow-up to our link on Friday to Antony Green’s
paper on spoiled and wasted ballots and optional preferential voting:

Your item today on informal voting reminded me of a question I asked after the Werriwa by-election (see here
) – was this the first time in a Federal Lower House seat that an
informal vote came in in second place? Indeed, informal came second by
a huge margin – 10,162 compared to 5,237 for third place. I didn’t see
any mention of this at the time, but it must be a fairly rare
occurrence. I don’t know if any of your psephological gurus could
answer this.

Andrew Bartlett
Australian Democrats Senator for Queensland