Here’s my usual message to cope with the large number of people directed to this blog by Google on election night.
I will not be providing election night commentary here. Instead I will be on the ABC’s live television coverage of the result. And you can follow the results themselves at ABC Elections.
My WA election guide is here. Results will be available through the site on the night.
If I get chance I may provide some postal election night commentary through this post over the coming week.
Antony, there has been quite a bit of public discontent in WA about the performance of the WAEC in this election. Mostly about long lines at polling booths, and running out of ballot papers. Did you observe whether the pace of the WA vote count was significantly different to previous years? On election night there seemed to be some seats, including one which appears to have changed hands, that didn’t report any vote count at all on the night.
COMMENT: There seem to have been a small number of electorates where reporting was terrible. I understand there were technical reasons in these seats. In my opinion the reporting of first preferences on the night was slower than in 2021. Whether this was due to fewer counting staff or delays in results being reported I am not sure. There is a particular issue in WA where they will not report preference counts until they are completely sure they have the correct pairing in a seat. Elsewhere the preference counts are simply reported in the results feed, and if it become apparent the wrong pairing has been chosen, the results are later suppressed.
Post-election the WAEC has an extremely centralised counting procedure. Basically the Returning Officers quickly pack up shop and everything is transferred to the central counting centre for completion.
I think the WAEC did not have a good strategy for communicating what was going on with the count. It seemed to be more about general media inquiries rather than the more detailed information that I was often asking. I am curating an election results site that receives far more visits than the WAEC site and I need to know more information about what’s happening with the counting. I asked a series of questions before election day about procedures for preference counting on election night and post-election. The response was ‘TBC’ (to be confirmed) but no information came. Thankfully the result wasn’t close. I suspect the WAEC communications staff were otherwise busy dealing with the bad headlines about polling places running out of ballot papers.