Extract from Huffington Post

All thanks to the odd rules of the Senate.

05/08/2016 10:48 AM AEST | Updated 05/08/2016 12:48 PM AEST

Josh Butler Associate Editor, HuffPost Australia

Fairfax Media

One Nation's Malcolm Roberts won just 77 personal votes.

One Nation's Malcolm Roberts, announced on Thursday as a senator for QLD, was elected to parliament with just 77 first preference personal votes, while two of Nick Xenophon's candidates in South Australia didn't fare much better.

As we finally found out on Thursday who would get a seat in our new Senate, the Australian Electoral Commission also released the data around how those people got elected. We've got 30 from the Coalition, 26 from Labor, nine from the Greens and a crossbench of 11, and as the AEC points out, some of that crossbench recorded very low personal votes.

But before we go any further, it's important to point out that the personal vote means very little in the end game of getting elected -- this is just an interesting bit of trivia.
In the Senate, most voters only vote above the line for a party, not below the line for a specific candidate, so it is theoretically possible for a candidate to get zero personal votes but to get elected to the Senate if their party as a whole gets enough votes. This is what has happened in this election.

According to the AEC, One Nation's Malcolm Roberts got just 77 votes in QLD. That's seventy-seven. How did he get elected, you might ask? Because One Nation's ticket got almost 230,000 votes -- that's over one full quota, which means that their first-placed candidate (that's Pauline Hanson) was automatically elected, and with the leftover bit of the quota plus preference flows, their second candidate (Roberts) got elected too.
Read more about Roberts, and the other One Nation candidates, in our full story here.