The Civil Liberties Party ends election night holding the only position in the new Senate that can hold anything: three seats of its own, a fourth in an independent it helped elect, and the presidency already in hand.

Senator Right Kelvin and notcom36 were both returned at the top bar, on the strength of a full quota each. Med took a third seat later in the count, making the CLP the only party to win at both ends of the night — under the highest threshold and after it had run out.

The number that decides the term

Overriding a presidential veto takes two-thirds of the Senate. Two-thirds of eleven is 7.33, so an override needs eight votes. Four together makes eight impossible.

With the presidency held by the CLP, the party enters the term able to see its programme through and to stop what it does not want. On the arithmetic, the other seven cannot combine into an override however they line up.

One qualification belongs on the record. Sirius stood and was elected as an independent, and nothing obliges them to vote with the party that backed them.

ROSE matched the seats and lost the night

The Revolutionary Organization for Social Equality finished level with the CLP on three, but got there by attrition. tmc was elected at round 12 and the party then lost four candidates in five rounds — SEx eggy, Jotan, miln and PHon, out at 11, 13, 14 and 15. By the end of round 15 ROSE had nobody left on the sheet.

The Fucking Best Party lost both its candidates, at rounds 18 and 19.

The seat that settled it

Round 23 came down to two names: Vlad of the Solidarity Party, and the CLP’s Evil senator. It went to the CLP, and it is the seat that makes the bloc four rather than three.

Vlad is the former Chief Ombudsman — head of the oversight authority the Plan B Act abolished, and the office a restoration bill would have brought back before the Senate struck it out 3–2 last week. The senator who moved that amendment was notcom. The author of the bill was brandmal. Both sit in the new chamber.

Three seats filled without a quota

Six of the eleven cleared the top bar, one got in at 4 and one at 3. The last three — Med, qd1m and Ty — were elected in what the Commission called the second phase, with no threshold at all.

That is the tail end of Threshold Equal Approval. Once the bar has walked down to 1 and seats remain, the count stops asking who can make a quota and gives what is left to whoever holds the most unspent ballot weight. As the Electoral Commissioner put it: “everyone who gets elected after this point wasn’t good enough to get elected earlier.”

Two judicial vacancies

Ty, elected in that second phase, has resigned as Court of Review Judge and as Immigration Judge on taking the seat, leaving both benches short.

The Immigration Judge vacancy falls at an awkward moment. The Border Wall Location Adjustment Act, currently before the electorate at referendum, would rewrite the President’s power to appoint and designate Immigration Judges, and would put every Apply to Join activation under judicial review. Who fills that seat, and under which version of Article 3, is not settled by this election.

We counted it ourselves

This paper has run the Electoral Commission’s published ballot sheet — 80 ballots, 28 candidates — through its own implementation of Threshold Equal Approval, and reached the same result: the same eleven senators, in the same order, at the same thresholds.

Nothing in the count depended on taking the Commission’s word for it, and the full round-by-round working, including the cost in ballot weight of every seat, is published here.

The quota was 7.2727. Emilia’s seat cost each of the 25 ballots backing them 0.2909 of their voting power; by the time the bar reached 3 there was not enough unspent weight left in the electorate for anyone to make a quota at all, which is how the last three seats came to be filled without one.

One difference is worth stating: our round numbers are not the Commission’s. It numbers eliminations as rounds, this count numbers only the rounds in which a seat was filled or the bar was lowered. The decisions, and the order of them, are identical.

The Senate as elected

Senator	Party	Elected at
💗 Emilia 💗	ROSE	bar of 5
brandmal	ROSE	bar of 5
tmc	ROSE	bar of 5
Senator Right Kelvin	Civil Liberties Party	bar of 5
Sirius (Tirado)	Independent	bar of 5
notcom36	Civil Liberties Party	bar of 5
Lax Likes Trains	Solidarity Party	bar of 4
Democracy For You	Independent	bar of 3
Med	Civil Liberties Party	second phase
qd1m	Revitalize! SimDem	second phase
Ty	Independent	second phase

Three seats each to the CLP, ROSE and independents; one each to Solidarity and Revitalize! SimDem.