As with every election, there’s some folks – almost always independents – who go to all the trouble of registering, and then don’t seem to do anything else. In these days of our terminally online culture, they somehow manage to slip through the cracks and remain unfindable online, at least to our sophisticated search techniques, which consist of using the following search terms:
- “candidate name” + senate
- “candidate name” + election
- “candidate name” + australia
- “candidate name” + victoria
(Yes, we could include the year, but the recency bias of most search engines makes that unnecessary.)
Gentle reader, if you should stumble across any of the folk listed below in the course of your internet wanderings – or if you are one of the folk listed below – please let us know! We want to give everyone the best coverage we can.
The Group T independents are all somewhat MIA: Found them!
Raj Saini – unfortunately, there is a more infamous Canadian politician with the same name, which makes searching for them difficult. But even adding “Australia” or “Victoria” to the search terms doesn’t seem to help.Kirti Alle – search results turn up their name only on lists of candidates, or in non-political contexts.Yashaswini Srinivas Kanakagiri – search results turn up their name only on lists of candidates, or in non-political contexts.
In the Ungrouped section, four of the eight candidates are unfindable:
- Susantha Abeysinghe –
It’s possible that this is the same person, but there’s no mention of the Federal election on their page. We have reached out to them to check, still waiting on a response as of 21/4.Found them! - Lawrence Harvey –
search results turn up their name only on lists of candidates, or in non-political contexts. Plus, there seem to be multiple people with this name, making identification even more difficult.Found them! - K Black –
search results turn up their name only on lists of candidates, or in non-political contexts. Plus, this is further complicated by the multiple people with whose name is “firstname K. Black”, making identification even more difficult.Found them! Nate Ritter – search results turn up their name only on lists of candidates, or in non-political contexts.Found them!
Wow, we’ve actually found almost everyone this year! We can only hope that this is not a portent of the Apocalypse.
This is one of the funnier parts of each election cycle. Good work for trying.
I did find a LinkedIn profile for a “Yashaswini K.” that had a generalised post about politics, but it didn’t provide any useful insight and I can’t be sure, so I’ve discarded it. I suspect you’re right about Abeysinghe, he ran in the Dandenong council election for Yarraman ward and was impossible to contact then so I’m not optimistic about being able to find out more about him now.
I’m planning to reach out to Abeysinghe this evening via Facebook, so we’ll see how that goes.
Kia ora,
K. Black (Kathryn Black per the candidate checklist supplied to the AEC) is a front candidate for “Crikey for PM”, yes as in the news outlet Crikey, who decided to register a candidate as part of a news feature they’re doing. This is confirmed here in an article that requires a free subscriber log-in to read: https://www.crikey.com.au/2025/04/14/crikey-for-pm-registers-a-candidate-2025-federal-election/
Cheers,
André/Axvoter (Blatantly Partisan Party Reviews on Tumblr)
Many thanks André! Looking forward to reading your posts this year!
Raj Saini has a website available now – https://rajsaini.com.au/
Assuming the two women in the photo are Kirti Alle and Yashaswini Srinivas Kanakagiri.
His twitter has, amongst other things, a photo with Modhi which i’m choosing to interpret as i will.
https://x.com/rajksaini?lang=en
Thanks Chris! One to keep an eye on.
Nate Ritter has an Instagram, not really much policy-wise but it’s what he’s using as a Candidate outlet
https://www.instagram.com/naterittersenate/
Ah, thank you James. We’ll check it out.
Your group T “Found them” link (https://www.somethingforcate.net/2025/04/16/raj-saini-kirti-alle-yashaswini-srinivas-kanakagiri-independents-2/) is broken, alas. Looks as though you lost them again. Great work overall though.
Thank you! The link should work now.
After a long search I finally found Lawrence Harvey’s campaign! https://www.facebook.com/uriel.700384/photos/d41d8cd9/122197487858122149/
For the VIC Senate ballot, I think that’s all groups and candidates accounted for.
And that’s a full lid! Thanks Daniel.
Can confirm that you got Susantha Abeysinghe correct. I’ve received their pamphlet in our mail.
I can send you photos as there are mentions of all the social media, but not sure it would help at this point in the game.
We’ve even written them up: Susantha Abeysinghe, Independent