by topic — Electoral rolls

Published for the National Aboriginal Consultative Committee (NACC) by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies in 2004, this CDROM contains the electoral roll for over 27,000 Indigenous people (aged 18 and over) who voted to elect 41 members of the National Aboriginal Consultative Committee ( NACC ) on 24 November 1973.

NACC voters had to be an Aboriginal person or Torres Strait Islander and registered on the Commonwealth Electoral Roll. The total number of Aboriginal adults eligible to enrol for the NACC elections was 53,000 and the total number of Aboriginals in Australia at the time is estimated at 116,000.

The NACC was the first national representative organisation in the Australian body politic for Australian Aborigines. Altogether there were 41 National Aboriginal Consultative Committee Electoral Districts: New South Wales 8; Victoria 3; Queensland 9; South Australia 4; Western Australia 8; Tasmania 1; and Northern Territory 8. Electors residing in the Capital Territory were included in the appropriate Electoral District for the State of New South Wales.

In 1977 the Federal Government dissolved the NACC and replaced it with the National Aboriginal Conference (NAC), which in turn was abolished in 1986. The NAC was subsequently superseded by the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC), established by the Federal Government under Bob Hawke through the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission Act 1989 (the ATSIC Act), which took effect on 5 March 1990. ATSIC was then formally abolished on 24 March 2005 by the Federal Government under John Howard.

The Australian Electoral Commission has guides ' Electoral Milestones for Indigenous Australians ' and a 'History of the Indigenous Vote' at Australian Electoral History.

The Ancestry Library database currently includes electoral rolls for the following Australian states and years under its subject heading Census & Voter Lists :

Australian Capital Territory: 1928, 1935

New South Wales: 1930, 1936

Northern Territory: 1922, 1929, 1934

Queensland: 1903, 1905, 1913, 1919, 1925, 1930, 1936

Tasmania: 1914, 1919, 1928, 1936

Victoria: 1856, 1903, 1909, 1914, 1919, 1924, 1931, 1936

Western Australia: 1901, 1906, 1916, 1925, 1936

The NSW State Library has a comprehensive collection of electoral rolls, particularly for NSW, and a guide to this collection at Getting Started : Electoral Rolls.

This site provides information about Australia's electoral history, the results of past elections and how to enrol to vote. It also provides a list of frequently asked questions about elections and voting as well as a searchable index of electorates.

Produced by the Australian Institute of Genealogical Studies in 2003 and 2006 respectively, the 2 CDROMs are the nearest Australian database to a census at the start of the twentieth century.

Each volume combines almost 900,000 men and women voters from the various states, from the earliest complete, surviving, post-Federation, electoral rolls that have been microfilmed.

Both volumes provides names, addresses and occupations and allow advanced searching on all fields. Each also has maps showing electoral districts for the states covered.

Research possibilities suggested include:

* Search on name and find that missing ancestor who may have followed the 'Gold Rush';

* Search on address to find out who were neighbours and who else lived in the same street;

* Search by name and occupation if a female's married name is not known;

* Social historians can see a 'snapshot' of any electoral area.

An additional floppy disc, containing a database update to Volume 1 (for NSW, Tas. and WA), is on order. It contains approximately 30,000 names in 45 subdivisions which were omitted from the original CDROM.

This map links to Portable Document Format (PDF) files of individual Commonwealth electoral division maps for New South Wales and to an index map of Sydney electoral divisions.

New Zealand Electoral Roll 1881

Produced by the New Zealand Society of Genealogists in 2004, this CDROM lists voters in the New Zealand general election of 1893. The election was held on November 28 to elect a total of 74 MPs to the 12th session of the New Zealand Parliament. The official turnout was 302,997 voters, representing 75.3% of the electorate. Elections for the 4 Maori seats by the Maori vote were held on 20 December. There were no actual electoral rolls for the Maori seats until 1948-9.

When Governor Glasgow signed the New Zealand Electoral Bill on 19 September 1893, New Zealand became the first self-governing nation in the world where women had won the right to vote (over 21 and including maori women) and women voted for the first time in the 1893 election. The election was won by the Liberal Party and Richard Seddon became Prime Minister.

For New Zealand's first parliamentary elections in 1853, voting was restricted to any male British subject aged 21 years or older who owned freehold property worth £50 or more; or paid at least £10 a year to lease property; or lived in a house with an annual rental value of at least £10 (in a town) or £5 (outside a town). 'Aliens' (that is, people who were not British subjects, such as Chinese) were specifically excluded. In 1860 the right to vote was extended for the first time - to gold miners. Any male British subject over 21 who held a miner's right (that is, a licence, which cost £1 per year) was entitled to vote without having to enrol.

In 1859 the British Crown Law office confirmed that Maori could not vote unless they had individual title granted by the Crown. Very few Maori could qualify to vote under the property requirement because they possessed their lands communally (as iwi, hapu or whanau groups) and not under individual freehold or leasehold title like Europeans.

In 1867 Parliament established, as a temporary measure, 4 Maori seats in the House of Representatives in which all Maori men over 21 could vote for their own representatives. As a result of the 1867 legislation, Maori men achieved universal manhood suffrage 12 years before European men. However, since the Maori population in 1867 was about 50,000 and the European population about 250,000, Maori were significantly under-represented with only 4 seats compared with the European 72 seats. In 1876 these 4 seats became permanent. The seats were allocated on a geographical basis (North, South, East, West). The number of reserved seats remained fixed until the recent change in the New Zealand electoral system in 1993.

In 1879 the franchise was extended to all adult European men, regardless of whether they owned or rented property. In 1889 plural voting was abolished, which confirmed the principle of 'one man, one vote'. This ended the practise of men who owned or leased property in several different electorates being able to enrol and vote in each of them. Plural voting had been made easier by the fact that until 1881 elections in different seats were usually held on different days.

A separate Maori electoral roll was not established until 1949 but Maori were not legally obliged to enrol until 1956. From 1975 Maori could choose to enrol on either the General or Maori roll: the only qualification for enrolment on the Maori roll was self-identification as Maori. Prior to 1975 Maori with at least one full-blood parent were obliged to enrol on the Maori roll, whilst those with a lower proportion of Maori blood could choose to enrol on either the European (now General) or Maori roll. In 1986 there were 1,920,256 people (both Maori and non-Maori) on the General roll and 70,564 on the Maori roll.

Futher details on the history of the New Zealand vote at the Elections New Zealand website at Elections New Zealand - History of the Vote .

The NSW State Library Family History Service holds New Zealand electoral rolls on microfiche for the period 1865-1900; 1902-1903; 1905-1906; 1908; 1911; 1914; 1919; and 1922-1981.

Index of Northern Territory combines information from census records, directories and electoral rolls and includes lists of government officials. The surviving census of the Northern Territory 1881 to 1921; the electoral rolls 1884 to 1940; and the directories 1908 to 1930 are transcribed in to this publication.

Entries cover name, sex, place of living, occupation, roll number, subdivision and division. Electoral redistribution changes and Divisional boundaries of the day are also included.

Entries cover name, sex, place of living, occupation, roll number, subdivision and division. Electoral redistribution changes and Divisional boundaries of the day are also included.

This is a Society of Australian Genealogists index, compiled by the late Harry Freeman, which enables you to find out which Sydney Federal Electoral Division and Subdivision(s) a particular Sydney street is located in for the period 1903 to 1984.

City, state and federal electoral rolls can be very useful when researching Sydney ancestors, but finding your ancestor in the electoral rolls of a city as large as Sydney can be a lengthy process. The first step is to find your ancestor's address at a relevant date - for instance, in birth, marriage & death records or Sands Postal directories (to 1933). However, street names can change, along with street numbering systems and the boundaries of the various electoral wards, divisions or subdivisions. Often there was no alternative to undertaking a systematic search through each subdivision of each available roll.

SAG's online index to Sydney streets in 20th century federal electoral rolls allows search by street name - starting with the initial letter of street name - and will respond with a list of divisions/subdivisions in which the street is listed, in year order. In some cases street names have changed - sometimes as the result of removing duplicate street names. Check the 'Streets General' heading, which deals with cross references, name changes etc. at the top of each street search result list.

In a number of cases more than one answer will be provided, because the street crossed (sub)division boundaries. In 1903 and 1906 the listing arrangement was by polling place rather than subdivision; in a few cases in those years it was difficult to be sure of the correct subdivision and the field was left blank - it will be necessary for you to check all subdivisions. The names of 'divisions' (i.e. electorates) and subdivisions often provide few clues to their geographic coverage.

It is worth adding that the NSW State Library Family History Service has a place or suburb name card index to NSW electoral districts for 1859 to 1899 and for NSW Federal electoral districts for 1903 to 1969. Additionally, there are some state electorate guides by streets, roads and localities for limited years and a Federal electoral district atlas entitled ' Commonwealth of Australia 1901-1988 electoral redistributions '.

The NSW State Library has a comprehensive collection of electoral rolls, particularly for NSW, and a guide to this collection at Getting Started : Electoral Rolls.

Subscription required for full access to the 192.com search engine, which holds over 600 million records of people, businesses and places.

Search UK 2002-2007 electoral rolls, births, deaths & marriages for the period 1837 to 2004, 1861 census records, telephone directories and maps.

Payment is required to view addresses from electoral rolls but there is free access to telephone directory information.