Victoria is the last state in Australia where politicians can legally decide where your preferences go. That loophole is being exploited. Here is what Victorian voters need to know before Nov’26
By Sue Barrett
Here is a sentence that should not be possible in a modern democracy: you vote for “Refugees Are Welcome Here” and your vote ends up with One Nation.
Legally. Deliberately. By design.
This is not a hypothetical. It is the documented strategy behind at least four parties registered for Victoria’s 2026 state election – and it is possible because Victoria is the last jurisdiction in Australia still using a system called Group Voting Tickets.
What Group Voting Tickets actually are
When you vote above the line in Victoria’s upper house – the Legislative Council – you hand your preferences to the party you voted for. They decide where your vote goes next. Not you. Them.
Under Victoria’s Group Voting Ticket system, parties register their preference order with the Victorian Electoral Commission before the election. That order is secret from most voters. When you vote 1 above the line for a party, your subsequent preferences flow exactly as that party has arranged – through backroom deals with other parties, often managed by professional preference brokers known as “preference whisperers.”
As ABC election analyst Antony Green put it, your vote embarks on a “preferential magical mystery tour” – routed through micro-parties you have never heard of, ending up wherever the operators paid for it to go.
In 2018, a candidate from the Transport Matters party was elected to the Victorian Legislative Council on just 0.63 per cent of the primary vote. That is not a democratic outcome. That is a system being gamed.
Under this system, a party with as little as one per cent of the primary vote can effectively engineer a seat in Victoria’s upper house. Every other state has ended this. The federal Senate ended it in 2016. Victoria has not.
The four parties – and who is really behind them
Four parties have been registered for Victoria’s 2026 election with names designed to appeal to progressive voters. Legally they are real parties. But their stated purpose – in their creators’ own words – is to redirect voters’ preferences, not to govern.
Investigative reporting by The Guardian, confirmed by cybersecurity researchers at UNSW, has established that all four share identical website templates, the same registration timing, and the same IP address. A cybersecurity researcher from UNSW told The Guardian this digital footprint is the equivalent of “finding a whole load of political flyers from different campaigns in the same person’s desk drawer.”
Save the Environment was created by Monica Smit – founder of Reignite Democracy Australia, an anti-lockdown group known for spreading COVID-19 conspiracy theories. Smit has been explicit in videos about her strategy: create parties with “catchy names so that uneducated voters see a name they like” and funnel their preferences to One Nation, the Libertarian Party, or Family First.
Free Palestine was created by Avi Yemini – a Melbourne-based right-wing YouTuber who has previously criticised pro-Palestinian movements. Yemini called the plan “genius” and described it as “harvesting the hate vote” – attracting voters passionate about Palestine and redirecting their votes to conservatives. His video featured footage of Pauline Hanson to clarify who the beneficiaries would be.
Muslim Votes Matter shares its name almost identically with a real, pre-existing grassroots advocacy group established before the 2025 federal election. Yemini has claimed credit for the concept. Ghaith Krayem, national spokesperson for the legitimate Muslim Votes Matter, lodged a formal complaint with the Victorian Electoral Commission, accusing the anonymous creators of attempting to mislead voters.
Refugees Are Welcome Here is the fourth party. Its domain was registered on 5 May 2026 on the same server infrastructure as the other three. When asked if she was behind it, Monica Smit did not deny it.
One Nation has not publicly disavowed these preference flows.
Why this is legal – and why your vote can end up there
Because Victoria’s Group Voting Ticket system gives parties almost total control over preference flows. If you vote above the line for one of these parties, your vote can legally end up with Pauline Hanson’s One Nation – because the party’s secret preference deal says so.
The creators are not hiding what they are doing. They have explained it openly in videos and public statements. They are exploiting a legal mechanism that the rest of Australia has already abolished.
The bill that would fix it
The Electoral Amendment (Group Voting and Vote Counting) Bill 2026 was introduced into the Victorian parliament in February 2026. It proposes to abolish Group Voting Tickets and bring Victoria into line with every other Australian jurisdiction.
Two parliamentary inquiries – both chaired by Labor MPs – have called for exactly this reform. The Victorian Electoral Commission has flagged an August deadline for the legislation to pass in time for November’s election.
The bill exists. The case is overwhelming. The question is whether it passes in time.
What you can do right now
If you are a Victorian voter, the most important thing you can do before November is vote below the line on the upper house ballot paper.
Voting below the line means you number individual candidates in your own order of preference. You control where your vote goes – not a preference whisperer operating from a shared server. It takes two to three extra minutes. In return, you keep control of your vote.
You can also contact your Victorian state MP and ask them to support the Electoral Amendment (Group Voting and Vote Counting) Bill 2026 before the August deadline.
And if you see a party name that sounds too perfectly aligned with your values – ask who is behind it. Apply the five questions. Check the VEC’s registered party list at vec.vic.gov.au. The answers are there if you look.
The system that allows this to happen is a choice – one that Victoria’s parliament can reverse before November. The only thing missing is the political will.
Your Vote. Your choice. Vote below the line.
Your Vote. Your Future.
You know what to do.
Onward we press
Sue Barrett is the founder of Democracy Watch AU and Before You Vote – a free civic education resource for every Australian who wants to cut through the spin. Before You Vote publishes every Tuesday and Friday. If this was useful, share with it to five people.
This article was originally published on Sue Barrett
Also by Sue:
The think tank that built the Liberal Party just picked a new client
Why I Cannot Stand By: Protesting Israeli President Herzog’s Visit to Australia
The Tide Is Turning: Why I Stand with Young People for a New System of Power
Holding Our MPs Accountable because if the NACC Won’t, We Will
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Oh how the money rolls in, rolls in,
Voting for PHONeys should be a sin.
And now, A Abbott, the sound barrier breaking high speed onanist, as befits a mediaeval romanist, schmoozes up to the scarletskulled broom jockey, and why? Abbott is riddled, maggoted, Freuded up, with deep misfittery, for he got dumped, rejected, condemned, and, fixated by the returns of miasmic Menzies and Jack the Jerk Howard, believes it a MUST that he redeem himself, his life, his kampf. He must Golgotha and be miraculous in redemption. Nail that to your cross of nightmare horror. Oh, more than fish and chip money here…
I’d say this information is being disseminated fairly well, although hard to say whether mainstream press will cover it. I have heard about it 4 times and once has been word of mouth, which I think is the more important one. Hopefully everyone knows about it before the election. I can imagine that, since it’s not illegal, they will just found more fake parties every time the names are publicised.
Victorian politics is corrupt and rotten to the core. This is another example of how far down the sewer pipe Australian politics has descended. Now we are down to the slime level where the subterranean creatures proliferate uncontrolled. Don’t think the Liberals and Nationals are finished – they are just changing the colours of their scales. Why do you think Tony Abbott has been recalled to duty? Watch how Josh Friedenberg will arise from the ashes in time to support the mewling boomers who have largely forgotten their origins. And certainly there is a back room committee in the Victorian Labor Party headquarters burning the midnight candles trying to find a way out of the post-Dan Andrews mire. One Nation is an obvious distraction supported by the likes of Clive Palmer and Gina Rinehart. The Murdochracy and Costello’s 9 media networks assist by lampooning Pauline Hanson and Albanese so as to distract voters with click bait whilst remaining silent about the corporate influences that are plotting their preferred outcome of the next election. The only hope (for me) is to find an aspirant independent candidate and then get to KNOW them and their preferences well BEFORE polling day opens. Hopefully multiple genuine independent candidates will cross-reference each other to the disadvantage of the larger parties and that way we may come closer to the idea of Citizens Assemblies. Meanwhile I will circulate this article to my recumbent family and hopefully awaken them from their Covidian era induced torpor. Remember: an informal vote will only reduce the protest vote because it doesn’t count to the dissenters advantage.
Haven’t voted above the line ticket for the last three decades, always own nominations, I read about politics a lot and none of them impress me one bit.
Never trusted Dan Andrews at all and the circus that he oversaw with Covid-19 was despicable in every sense of the word, it’s not what he did it was how he went about it.
High time people started to take more interest in politics because as many are discovering to their chagrin, it impacts every aspect of your life.
Part of my education was They Vote for you and Antony Green, miss his observations.
What saddens me at the moment is that so many are being gaslighted with this Hanson crap, and that’s what it is, yes, we need change, however be sensible about it, people are behaving like sheep right now and we actually need that brown dog to run the country, he’s smarter than most.
Question is, who’s the brown dog?