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

Federal elections

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.

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.

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 Howard government reached 57% of the senate 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.

State and territory elections

Barbados

Canada

Canadian politics has seen electoral wipeouts at both provincial and federal level.

Fiji

Germany

The use of an electoral threshold in German elections means that sometimes a major party can fail to win seats in the Bundestag or a state parliament, either because their vote share falls below 5% or because the number of directly-elected seats drops below 3. Post-war examples include:

New Zealand

Until it moved to a proportional representation system in 1996, general elections in New Zealand were also prone to the possibility of wipeouts, though these in general involved the likelihood of third parties getting few or no seats rather than one of the two major parties being massively underrepresented. This former circumstance occurred most starkly in the 1981 general election, in which the Social Credit Party gained 20.6% of the vote yet gained only two seats in the 92-seat parliament.

The 1935 general election did, however, see a major party wipeout, and led to the creation of a new major party. In the 1935 election, the Labour Party gained 46.1% of the vote to the United/Reform Coalition's 32.9%, but won 53 seats to the United/Reform's 19. As a result of this election the two coalition parties merged to form the National Party, which remains a major force in current New Zealand politics.

Philippines

In the Philippines, the House of Representatives (and its predecessors) are, for the most part, elected under first-past-the-post (FPTP) system; in 1998, parallel voting was instituted, where 20% of the seats are contested in a party-list system, with the 80% of the seats still being elected via FPTP. The Senate since 1941 has been elected under multiple non-transferable vote. From 1941 to 1951, voters can vote under general ticket, which can lead to wipeouts for any party that wins the election. In 1978, this was also the electoral system for the Interim Batasang Pambansa (parliament).

Poland

The chaotic emergence of a democratic political scene following the fall of communism and the often-changing electoral system caused many wipeouts in Polish electoral history:

Spain

  • In the 1982 Spanish general election, ruling Union of the Democratic Centre went down from 168 to 11 seats, out of 350, and were ousted from government.
  • In the April 2019 Spanish general election, the People's Party went from holding 127 of the 208 directly elected senate seats to just 54, falling from a comfortable overall majority of 61% of seats to holding just over 27% of the total, despite the fact that the Spanish electoral system for the Senate all but guarantees at least one seat for the runner-up party in 47 of the 50 provinces. Meanwhile, in the Congress of Deputies, the PP lost all their seats in the Basque Country (down from 2) and were reduced to a single one in Catalonia (down from 5).
  • In the November 2019 Spanish general election the Citizens party lost 47 of their 57 seats in Congress.

United Kingdom

General elections

Scottish elections

The Scottish Parliament elections uses a version of the Additional member system, meaning that 73 seats are won through First Past the Post constituency votes, and additional seats are added for the regional vote which uses a variation of the D'Hondt method.

Welsh elections

The Senedd uses the additional member system.

Elsewhere

References

  1. ↑ "Western Australia Election 2021 Results". abc.net.au. Retrieved 2021-06-11.
  2. ↑ "ABC Search|Kirkup concedes election". search-beta.abc.net.au. Retrieved 2021-06-11.
  3. ↑ "Liberal Party almost entirely wiped out in WA election landslide that was over before it began". www.abc.net.au. 2021-03-13. Retrieved 2021-06-11.
  4. ↑ "Barbados General Election Candidates 2018". Caribbean Elections. Retrieved 21 November 2020.
  5. ↑ Woodcock, Andrew (8 May 2021). "Labour retains control of the Welsh Parliament, matching its best-ever result". The Independent. Retrieved 25 May 2022.
  6. ↑ "Fianna Fail is wiped out in the Irish General Elections which were won by Fine Gael that failed however to achieve an Absolute Majority". www.robert-schuman.eu.
  7. ↑ "The spectacular fall from grace of Ireland's Fianna Fail should serve as a warning to the UK and other governments across Europe who are treating the financial crisis with ill-tasting austerity measures". March 9, 2011.
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