Victoria’s most marginal seat,Chisholm,is also the nation’s busiest for candidates at next month’s election.
Twelve candidates have nominated for the seat,which the Australian Electoral Commission said was the biggest field running in Australia’s 151 electorates.
The ballot,finalised on Friday,saw Liberal MP Gladys Liu selected in the lucky first spot while her Labor opponent Carina Garland is last.
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“Being at the bottom of a list of 12 makes it tough,” said ABC election analyst Antony Green,who also noted that the donkey vote – simply voting for candidates in the order in which their names appear on the ballot paper – is generally estimated to be about 1 per cent of the final tally.
Liu won the seat by a margin of just 0.57 per cent from Labor after preferences at the 2019 election.
She later faced down a Federal Court challenge to the result over her use of signs at all 29 voting booths in the seat,which used the same purple colour scheme as official AEC banners. The Chinese-language signsthat the “correct” way to vote was to put a “1″ next to the Liberal box.
![The signs outside a polling booth in Chisholm in 2019.](https://static.ffx.io/images/$width_300%2C$height_150/t_crop_auto/t_sharpen%2Cq_auto%2Cf_auto/32430bd75709e92897e4855914606b46b727392a)
The signs outside a polling booth in Chisholm in 2019.Luke Hilakari
Labor has nominated Chisholm as its chief target in Victoria at the May 21 election.
Along with Labor,the Liberals and The Greens,other parties to field candidates in Chisholm’s crowded field are One Nation,Derryn Hinch’s Justice Party,the Animal Justice Party,the United Australia Party and former Liberal Party member Wayne Tseng,who is now an independent.
Across Australia 1200 candidates nominated for the lower house,an average of eight per seat.
The lowest number of candidates enrolled – five – is shared by eight electorates in NSW and Queensland (Barton,Blaxland,Cook,Kingsford Smith,Watson,Bonner,Griffith,and Oxley).
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