Ahead of the November election, Jacinta Allan's government has foreshadowed plans to change voting practices in the upper house, abolishing group ticket voting or GTV.
The law tweak could have big ramifications for representation: with micro-parties on their way out, and established parties likely to share their seats.
Victoria is the last Australian jurisdiction to use GTV, which allows parties to assign preferences in upper house elections.
It is notorious for producing undemocratic outcomes, such as "Transport Matters" winning a seat in 2018 as the 12th most popular party with 0.6 per cent of the vote.
Electoral analyst William Bowe, who runs the Poll Bludger website, said the system was often gamed.
"If there were 15 parties who all got one per cent of the vote, they all organised to preference each other and that amounted to a 15 per cent preference snowball to get in," he told AAP.
At the 2022 election, 10 parties won seats: Labor, Liberal, National, Greens, Legalise Cannabis, Democratic Labour, One Nation, Animal Justice, Liberal Democrats, and Shooters, Fishers and Farmers.
Without GTV in 2026, Mr Bowe forecasts the micro-parties have micro hope.
"The likely result is that all of the seats are going to be divided up between the coalition, Labor, the Greens and One Nation," he said.
Current polling numbers - according to Mr Bowe's aggregate - show the top three parties close to a dead heat: the coalition on 26.6 per cent, One Nation on 25.6 per cent, and Labor on 24.1 per cent.
Those results would pencil in at least one MP for each party in each of the eight regions, guaranteeing a huge lift in representation for One Nation, given it polled just two per cent in 2022 for just one MLC.
However, it's the Greens which Mr Bowe says will be the "big winner" from the reform, given they were often the ones to miss out under the preference snowballs.
The Greens won four seats in 2022 after polling at 10.3 per cent and are tracking slightly higher at 13.5 per cent this time around.
The election prior, they won 9.3 per cent of the vote but returned just one MLC.
On their current polling numbers, Mr Bowe said they were likely to win or be in the mix for a seat in every electorate, rather than be at the whim of the GTV deals.
"Life is going to be more predictable for the Greens. Consistently now they're going to win around five seats every time," he said.
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