PRSA Members to Vote on Rebrand to Australian Electoral Reform Society — AGM 12 November 2026

The Proportional Representation Society of Australia (PRSA) — tracing its history back to the 1890s and describing itself as Australia's oldest continuing electoral reform coalition — has circulated a formal notice of motion for its 12 November 2026 AGM: a 17-motion package that would rename the organisation, broaden its remit far beyond its traditional single-issue focus, and modernise its governance from the ground up.

Following information was from this Google Doc provided by a member of PRSA as a heads up and call for people interested to sign up via their membership form here.

Just a heads up as usual that this post is AI assisted, but we spent some time to review and double check the results.

The headline changes

Name. The Society would drop "Proportional Representation Society of Australia Inc." in favour of Australian Electoral Reform Society Inc., trading as the Electoral Reform Society (ERS).

Purpose. The current constitution limits PRSA to a single objective: securing "the adoption and entrenchment of proportional representation using the single transferable vote." The proposed replacement is far broader — safeguarding trust in democratic institutions, improving the health of Australia's democracy, promoting voting-system reform ("ideally through the widespread adoption of proportional representation," rather than exclusively), conducting research, encouraging political participation, improving civics education, democratising civil society institutions, and promoting Australia's electoral policy successes globally.

Money. The Society is asking members to authorise the Council to spend "a necessary amount" from its roughly $80,000 reserve on a new website, brand design, copywriting, and associated fees to execute the rebrand.

The rest of the package

The other 14 motions are mostly governance modernisation rather than headline strategy:

Simplifying membership from four classes down to one, and letting the Council set fees directly
Formalising which decisions need a full member ballot, which need a special resolution at a general meeting, and which the Council can just decide
Adding bullying, harassment, discrimination, and bringing-the-Association-into-disrepute as grounds for disciplinary action
Allowing proxy votes at general meetings (but explicitly not for postal ballots)
Defaulting to online meetings rather than requiring Council discretion each time
Clarifying the President can appoint other spokespeople and make policy consistent with adopted positions
Moving from biennial to annual Council elections
Writing the Society's existing no-political-donations policy directly into the constitution
Aligning wind-up provisions with ACNC requirements, positioning the Society to seek charity/DGR status later
Adopting OpaVote as the default platform for internal ballots, with paper ballots only on request
Revoking a lengthy, prescriptive set of standing orders for meeting conduct

Why now

The case for all this is laid out at length in the notice, and it's a frank one. PRSA's last major reform win was the 2003 overhaul of the Victorian Legislative Council; before that, the ACT's 1995 adoption of STV. Since then the tide has arguably gone the other way — Victoria abolished proportional representation at local government level in 2017. Membership has been "relatively static" since the early 1990s: the Society currently has fewer than 50 members Australia-wide, over 60% of them men over 65, bringing in only about $700 a year in non-investment income. The role PRSA once played in public psephological commentary and election analysis has largely been taken over by independent bloggers and commentators (the notice specifically names Ben Raue's The Tally Room, Kevin Bonham, William Bowe's Poll Bludger, Antony Green, and Casey Briggs), and its fee-for-service vote-counting work has been displaced by free online tools.

A 2025 survey of past/present members and external stakeholders — 21 member responses (39% response rate) and 26 stakeholder responses (12%) — found strong support for broadening scope: majorities backed both the rename and a wider mandate, and "The Electoral Reform Society" was members' clear first preference among the name options tested.

How the vote works

Adopting these changes requires a special resolution: at least a 75% majority of members voting at the AGM. Under PRSA's current rules, proxy voting is not permitted at all ("Proxies are not permitted to be used in proceedings under these Rules") — and since Motion 6 (which would introduce limited proxy voting for future general meetings) is itself one of the things being voted on, it can't apply retroactively to the meeting that adopts it. In practice: for this AGM, a member's vote only counts if they personally attend or otherwise directly participate — there's no proxy path this time.

Getting involved

Membership costs $18/year. Given the direct-participation requirement above, joining before the AGM is what would let a new member's vote count. PRSA's own website hosts a membership application/renewal form (also available as DOCX) confirming the $18 individual fee — but that form is not the motions notice itself. The detailed 17-motion proposal referenced throughout this post is set out in the Google Doc circulated to the community (see the sourcing note at the top of this post). Confirm the AGM's exact registration cutoff and the notice's official status directly with the Society rather than relying on this post.

Why it matters for DOD's Democracy Landscape

PRSA is already in DOD's Democracy Landscape as an electoral-reform advocacy organisation, currently described there as focused specifically on STV. If this passes, that description — and quite possibly the org's name in our own records — will need updating regardless of which way individual motions land, since even the "no" outcome would be a notable data point about where Australia's oldest electoral-reform body's membership actually stands after 130 years.