Wipeout (elections)

An electoral wipeout occurs when a major party receives far fewer votes or seats in a legislature than their position justifies. It is the opposite of a landslide victory; the two frequently go hand in hand.

A use of the phrase generally assumes that the returns were the product of a legitimate election; show elections to fraudulent legislatures regularly produce incredibly strong majorities for the ruling party(s).

Australia

Between 1901 and 1949, the federal upper house, the Australian Senate, was elected by a system of majoritarian or "winner-take-all" voting. Each state had 3 of its 6 Senators retiring at each half-senate election. Each voter had 3 votes at each election, whether by first-past-the-post (FPTP) 1901-1918, or the alternative vote. It was often the case that the 3 seats all went the same way, leading to lopsided results in the six states such as 36-0 or 3-33. These results brought the parliament into some disrepute.

In 1948, the Single Transferable Vote (STV) was introduced. At the same time, the number of senators per state was increased from 6 to 10, with 5 instead of 3 retiring at each triennial election. The increased number of vacancies per election would have exacerbated the "landslide/wipeout" effect if the old winner-take-all system had been retained. Instead, having more seats ''increased'' the degree of proportionality between votes received and seats won by parties.

Since the introduction of STV in the Senate, the parties have generally been evenly balanced, with minor parties and independents holding the balance of power.

In the 2004 election, the government did the nearly impossible and reached 57% of the vote in Queensland after the distribution of preferences under the then-used Group Ticket Voting system. It thereby obtained a majority in its own right in the senate from July 2005, when the new senators took up their seats. The number of quotas required to win a majority (four) of six seats, at 57% (four-sevenths of the votes), is so high because there are an even number of seats.

In the lower house, FPTP was changed to preferential voting in 1918.

In the 1974 Queensland state election, using single-member electorates and full-preferential voting, the Labor opposition was reduced to a "cricket team" of eleven MPs, against the National Country Party/ Liberal Party Coalition government with 69 seats (and 2 Independents). Labor recorded an even worse result in the 2012 Queensland state election when it lost office and was reduced to seven seats, with the Liberal National Party of Queensland winning 78, the Katter's Australian Party winning 2 and 2 independents.

In the 2021 Western Australian state election, the WA Liberal opposition was reduced to only two seats against Labor's 53. This made them one of the only instances of one of the major parties having less seats than a third party (the Nationals received 4 seats in the election). This election had already been conceded by the Liberal leader Zak Kirkup before election day, but even Kirkup lost his seat, making him the first major party leader in 88 years in Western Australia to do so.

Barbados

* In the 2018 Barbadian general election