Australia doesn’t have primaries or winner-take-all elections. Politicians aren’t involved in redistricting, and voter suppression is virtually unheard of. The country has also made elections fun.
American electoral politics is not very “malleable” and can feel “set in stone,” in the words of three prominent political scientists.
Australia, by contrast, has a rich history of improving its system over time. As a result, voting is mandatory in Australia, and voters rank candidates from multiple parties. The Senate uses proportional representation, and an independent commission administers federal elections.
“All of these innovations play a kind of subconscious role in making people feel like their vote is worth it and that they have something to contribute,” said Bill Browne, director of the Democracy and Accountability program at the Australia Institute.

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Australia introduced mandatory registration in 1911 and mandatory voting in 1924. When everyone is compelled to cast a ballot, turnout rises sharply and more people are represented. Australia has also been on the forefront of other electoral innovations that have helped foster a more representative government and a more democratic society.
Preferential voting aka “ranked choice”
In 1918, Australia adopted preferential voting. There are no primaries, and voters rank all the candidates running for a position. If someone does not win a majority, voters’ additional preferences are taken into consideration. It’s often called “ranked-choice voting” in the U.S.
Some right-leaning Aussie politicians and U.S. Republicans view it as unfair. Australian politicians from other parties, and many experts, say it leads to winners who have the widest possible support, and in recent years, it’s led to big changes in Australia.

Take the example of Dr. Monique Ryan. Ahead of the 2022 federal election, few expected an independent like Ryan to win the House seat of Kooyong in Melbourne’s well-to-do eastern suburbs.
Since its creation in 1901, Kooyong had been staunchly conservative, and when Ryan launched her campaign, it was represented by Josh Frydenberg. He was Australia’s Treasurer, the equivalent of the U.S. Treasury Secretary, a top cabinet position in the center-right Liberal government in charge at the time. According to political analysts, he was also a potential future prime minister of Australia.
Ryan, a pediatric neurologist, was a political neophyte. But she saw an opportunity to challenge Frydenberg as a “teal,” a relatively new breed of Australian independent that pairs fiscal conservatism with a progressive agenda on climate.
After a grassroots campaign and help from a political action committee aiming to “climate-proof politics,” Ryan became the first independent member of Parliament (MP) for Kooyong in 121 years.
Had she been running for a House seat in the U.S. Congress in any state but Maine, Alaska or Hawaii, she would have lost.
On the first count, Ryan trailed Frydenberg by 2,433 votes. She had 40.3% of the vote to his 42.7%. They were the top two vote-getters in a large field, but neither had the support to win outright, so the election wasn’t over.

When counting concluded, Ryan had earned 52.9% of votes to Frydenberg’s 47.1%. Australia has multiple parties, and many voters who had marked the center-left Labor or left-wing Greens party as their first choice preferred the doctor over the political insider. In the end, it was their backing that pushed her over the edge.
“I think it’s a good system. It certainly permits the election of people like myself who aren’t from major parties,” Ryan told me in her office in Melbourne. “And there have always been independents in Australian politics.”
The first teal win came in 2019. Ryan was one of five more teals who won seats in 2022. All were first-time women candidates, and all of them won on preferences.
If this had been a winner-take-all system like in the U.S., five Liberal incumbents, all of them men, would have headed back to Parliament for three-year terms, preserving the status quo.
But under Aussie rules, a teal wave washed them out of office.
Australia’s preferential system gives independents and politicians from minor parties a chance at a seat by giving voters more choice, and when more parties win seats, politicians are incentivized to work together across party lines.
“We have to work across the spectrum,” said Samantha Ratnam, legislator in the state of Victoria for the left-wing Greens party. “It forces you to think about adapting your ideas, and that’s a really good thing to be open to change, compromise, be flexible. That leads to better outcomes for the community.”
In the U.S. House of Representatives, it’s a much different story. Out of 435 members of Congress, there are no independent or minor-party members.
Meanwhile, the two parties have drifted further away from one another and become less ideologically diverse with fewer conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans.
According to Monash University political theorist Matteo Bonotti, that type of polarization among lawmakers is unhealthy and can be an impediment to getting things done.
“The ideal situation is one in which you have a fairly broad range of political positions along the spectrum, but with no gaps,” he said. “So not an empty center or not an empty center-right, not an empty center-left.”
He said Australia, unlike the U.S., has a balance that works.
The status of “ranked-choice” in the U.S.
Ranked-choice voting has been expanding in the U.S. over the past two decades. But more recently, there’s been a growing backlash against it on the right. Since March 2022, 10 states with Republican-led legislatures have banned it for all state and local elections. Though there’s no evidence for the argument, GOP detractors say the system benefits Democrats.
Australia’s long history with preferential voting might help allay Republican fears of a liberal landslide were the system to be used more widely in the U.S. In the 106 years since the country adopted preferential voting, right or center-right parties have held government for more than twice as long as the center-left Labor Party, and a left-wing government has never risen to power.
In the U.S., one of the arguments against implementing ranked-choice voting is the system’s complexity — the thinking goes, anything that makes voting more complicated could depress turnout in a country that already has low turnout.
And, indeed, officials may not be prepared to handle the ballot-level complexity of preferential voting, at least at first. As conservative critics of preferential voting point out, some ranked-choice elections in the U.S., including the 2021 mayor’s race in New York City and a 2022 Oakland school board race, ran into issues because election officials were not familiar with the new systems.
As Americans go to the polls this fall, millions will weigh in on ranked-choice with voters in at least four states deciding whether to adopt it for future elections.
Proportional representation in the Australian Senate

In 1948, Australia’s Senate adopted proportional representation (PR).
It’s another electoral innovation that many experts say reflects the interests of voters more equitably than what we see in the U.S.
In a process called the single-transferable vote, voters rank candidates as they do for lower-house races. Then, after preferences are distributed, any candidate who reaches a threshold of votes known as the “quota” gets a seat.
Under this system, a group of lawmakers is elected to represent a district instead of an individual, and the final makeup includes a range of points-of-view, including minority voices.
In Australia, every state has 12 Senators, and while each state elects a mix of candidates from different parties, the full political spectrum tends to get a seat at the table in every state.

For example, Senators for the Australian state of New South Wales, home to Sydney, currently come from four parties: Labor (4), Liberal (4), Greens (2) and Nationals (2). The Greens are on the left-wing, Labor on the center-left, Liberal on the center-right and the Nationals on the right-wing.
Bill Browne of the Australia Institute said this type of proportional representation leads to productive politics.
“Neither of the major parties has a majority in the Senate that it can rely on. And that means that the passage of any legislation has to be a negotiation process,” he said. “That kind of collaborative government means that you can’t have a single party come into power and pursue its own agenda aggressively without having to account for other views.”
“It’s just something that we take for granted that there will always be an independent, at least one minor party or smaller representative in the Senate,” said Jill Sheppard, senior lecturer in the school of politics and international relations at Australian National University. “And if you look to the UK, or if you look to Canada or the U.S., that’s just not the norm.”
What proportional representation could look like in the U.S.
Proportional representation is the most widespread form of democracy in the world today, according to the Electoral Reform Society.
Some version of the system is in place in at least 100 countries — but not the United States.
The nonprofit Protect Democracy recently used the example of Massachusetts to illustrate how proportional representation could be a positive for American politics.
Massachusetts has nine House seats in Congress. All of them are held by Democrats. And yet, a third of voters in the state are Republicans.
That means that “Massachusetts Republicans,” who are likely to be more moderate, are not in Congress, leading to more political polarization. It’s not just Massachusetts though.
“California is not ‘blue’ — it is home to more registered Republicans than any state in the union,” write Protect Democracy policy advocate Grant Tudor and counsel Beau Tremitiere. “Texas is not ‘red’ — it is home to more Democratic voters than either New York or Illinois.”
The organization points out that adopting PR in the U.S. could lead to more competition between Democrats and Republicans, better representation for racial and ethnic minority groups, and more ideological diversity in Congress, with the potential for new minor parties to form in the future like we see in Australia.
A “one-stop shop” that voters trust
Upwards of 3,000 states, cities and counties are involved in administering any given federal election in the U.S. In Australia, the job is done by a single entity.
The Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) is an independent body that manages everything from printing ballots to setting up polling stations to tallying votes.

“It’s a one-stop shop,” said AEC commissioner Tom Rogers. “And people trust us as a result.”
Many U.S. election officials are elected officials from the Democratic or Republican parties. The AEC, on the other hand, is nonpartisan. Aussies know it by name. It gets very high marks from the public, and its organized, no-nonsense practices help build legitimacy around elections.
Notably, due to the way the AEC operates, two problems that plague American politics — voter suppression and gerrymandering — effectively do not exist down under.
“There is no voter suppression in Australia,” said Rogers. “We really go the extra mile to make sure that’s the case.”
The AEC is always working to expand voting options and increase turnout, but it’s a different story in the United States.
While mail-in and early voting have expanded in the U.S. in recent years, some people in states like Georgia and Texas waited as long as 11 hours to vote in the 2020 presidential primaries.
That’s in part because Southern states have closed nearly 1,200 polling places since the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, according to 100% Democracy: The Case for Universal Voting, a 2022 book by E.J. Dionne Jr. and Miles Rapoport.
That ruling ended a key part of the Voting Rights Act, the 1965 law that aimed to reverse a century of voter discrimination. And it allowed nine states to change their election laws without prior approval from the federal government.

Since Shelby, there’s been an explosion of state laws that good government groups label voter suppression, meaning any measure that aims to reduce registration or voting by a particular racial group, political party or religious community.
In addition to closing polling stations, states with Republican-led legislatures have passed dozens of voter ID laws, stepped up voter purges and have begun targeting groups that register voters.
Australians I talked with called such moves “undemocratic.” They also scoffed at another U.S. electoral phenomenon: Partisan gerrymandering, the engineering of district boundaries to favor the party in power.
Ear muffs in Illinois, snake by the lake in Ohio
U.S. states redraw their Congressional and legislative lines every 10 years after the census. If Democrats are in charge, you get districts that favor Democrats. Likewise with Republicans. And the results are eye-popping.
Take the 4th Congressional District in Illinois. It looks a little less strange now, but for decades it resembled a pair of ear muffs placed on its side. There was a North Side “ear covering” and a South Side “ear covering” with another district wedged in the middle, as well as a thin band — one block wide in one spot — connecting them in the Western suburbs.
It was known to politicos as “the Latino ear muffs” because Democrats drew the boundaries to give Latino candidates a clear path to victory.
Ear muffs in Illinois, the snake by the lake in Ohio, the broken-winged pterodactyl in Maryland, Australians don’t have anything like them.
“The sort of gerrymandering that happens in the United States doesn’t happen here,” said Judith Brett, author of From Secret Ballot To Democracy Sausage: How Australia Got Compulsory Voting.
Redistricting is known as “redistribution” in Australia, and redistributions happen as needed based on changes in population. Politicians, political parties and the public are free to submit recommendations, but an independent, nonpartisan committee that includes the Australian Electoral Commission makes the decisions and draws the maps.
There are no backroom deals. The process is uniform and transparent, and according to Brett, that leads to faith in the system.
“The legitimacy of election outcomes is not questionable in Australia in the way it clearly is in the United States,” she said.
In the U.S., redistricting leads to back-and-forth legal battles. Not so in Australia.
Monique Ryan, the independent MP, recently had her district of Kooyong in Melbourne redistributed, but the new lines were not a cause for concern.
“You don’t question it,” she said. “You accept it.”
“Sausage sizzles” on Election Day
On top of protecting against pernicious electoral problems we have in the U.S., Australia makes it very easy to cast a ballot.
There’s a robust tradition of early and mail-in balloting. The visually impaired can cast a ballot by phone. And you can vote at any polling station in your state.
“The vast majority of Australians are in and out in under 15 minutes,” said Rogers. “We have ample polling places everywhere.”
Election Day is on Saturday, not Tuesday, and there’s a party-like atmosphere with cake stalls and the ubiquitous “democracy sausage.”
Served at Election Day barbecues around the country, the dish is a simple affair: A crisp-skinned “snag” (as Australians call them) on a slice of white bread, often topped with ketchup and onions.
Citizen chefs set up grills at polling stations, often at primary schools, and sell the sausages to raise money for playground improvements, new volleyball equipment and other good causes.
The “sausages sizzles” lend a meaty aroma to the civic duty of voting.
This being Australia, where most people live near the coast, voters have been known to show up in bikinis, board shorts and budgie smugglers, and the celebration often rolls into the night.
Imagine that.
Correction: The number of polling places closed in Southern states since the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder has been nearly, not more than, 1,200. The statistic was also misattributed to the Brennan Center for Justice.
Reporter: Dan Tucker is executive producer of WBEZ’s daily talk show “Reset.” He traveled to Australia in June and produced this project with support from the Pulitzer Center as a Richard C. Longworth Media Fellow.
Photographer: Maddy Whitford is a journalist and photographer based in Alice Springs in Australia’s Northern Territory.
Editors: Jennifer Tanaka and Ariel Van Cleave.
Audio production: Meha Ahmad, Justin Bull, Cianna Greaves, Ariel Mejia, Ethan Schwabe, Micah Yason.
Digital production and design: Jesse Howe, Ellery Jones, Mendy Kong, Alden Loury, Angela Massino, Justin Myers, Sandra Salib, Justine Tobiasz.
Generous input: John Adams, Jorge Basave, Rashad Brown, Vanessa Chang, Mary Dixon, Dave Miska, Deshun Smith, William Thompson.
Democracy Solutions Project: This story is part of a collaboration of WBEZ, the Sun-Times and the University of Chicago’s Center for Effective Government examining critical issues facing our democracy in the run-up toNovember’s election.