Tuesday 21 April: To the acute embarrassment of ECSA, another story broke about “found” ballot papers. In fact the ballot papers were located a week or two ago, after the declaration of the polls but their existence only broke today. These are all absent votes, a small number taken at retirement homes in Newland, and absent votes taken on election day in Enfield polling places. This produced votes for other electorates, none of which were delivered to their home district in time to make the count. Hence ECSA’s press release being in a strange past tense with reference to the small number of ballots not having made it in to the count in other districts. The numbers involved are no more than a handful for any district and the districts involved had large margins.
Update – the votes have been counted and confirmed the victory of One Nation’s Chantelle Thomas. Here’s the text of the release by Acting Electoral Commissioner Leah McLay.
A count of Narungga ballot papers retrieved from the district of Stuart occurred at the Electoral Commission this morning.
The purpose of the count was for the Commission to determine whether the result in Narungga would have differed, had those ballots been included in the initial count and subsequent recount.
There were 81 ballot papers opened in the presence of scrutineers. Of those, 1 was rejected and 4 were deemed informal. Of the 76 votes counted in a two-party preferred count, 46 were for Chantelle Thomas, One Nation and 30 were for Tania Stock, Liberals. Had the ballot papers been included in the original count and subsequent recount, the margin in favour of Chantelle Thomas One Nation would have increased from 58 to 74.
I have therefore determined that the result in Narungga would not have differed had the ballots been included.
More info: An update on the votes. Liberal received 24 votes plus 6 preferences received for 30 votes after preferences. One Nation received 33 votes and 13 preferences for 46 after preferences. The votes were 57 Absent Early Votes and 19 Absent polling day votes.
My original commentary is now inside the post.
UPDATE: this post has been updated with more information of the votes found for electorates other than Narungga. I was under the impression only absent early votes were involved but it turned out to be absent votes from all polling places in Stuart.
Just when you thought counting was over for the SA election, it turns out three boxes of absent votes have been located.
The votes were cast at the Port Pirie Early Voting Centre and at polling places in the electorate of Stuart. They were not votes for Stuart, but rather absent pre-polls and pre-polls for all polling places. They were votes of people passing through Stuart during the campaign or on polling day, but enrolled in other electorates.
One of the neighbouring electorates is Narungga, which just happened to be the closest contest at the election. After a re-count, One Nation’s Chantelle Thomas won by just 58 votes.
And wouldn’t you know, of the early votes in the located boxes, 81 are for Narungga. Overall 642 votes have been discovered. There are fewer than 10 for most districts but not enough for any district other than Narungga to bring a result into question.
Tomorrow morning, the Electoral Commission will count these extra 81 votes. After preferences, the Liberal Party would need 70 of these 81 votes to overturn the result. This is extremely unlikly.
If these extra votes were to change the result in Narungga, it is not possible to declare a new winner. The result has been declared, Chantelle Thomas is the new MP and there will be no change to the result reported. If ballot papers, be they postal, absent or whatever, are not with the Returning Officer when the count is finalised and the winner declared, the result can’t be changed.
In the old days, when a winner was declared, the name of the winner used to be inscribed on the writ and returned to the Governor. When sworn in the new member would sign the back of the writ. The paper work is not quite as formal these days.
If these votes would change the declared result, then the Electoral Commission would petition the Court of Disputed Returns on the basis the result is unsound. They would challenge the return of the writ.
It is often forgotten that the basis of a Court of Disputed Returns case is to challenge the name of the member returned with the writ. If the extra votes would have changed the result, challenging the name of the returned member is exactly what the court case is about.
So how has this all come about, and why can’t the extra votes simply be added to the result?
(A note of clarification. The results have been declared, but the writs for all electorates won’t be returned until the Legislative Council count is declared after Anzac day.)
The Votes in Question
The 81 Narungga votes, 77 ordinaries and four declaration votes, were cast in Stuart. So were the 550 or so votes for other districts. All of these were forwarded to the Returning Officer for Stuart located in Port Augusta.
All of these were sorted into source and the district the votes were for. These votes, like all Absent votes, were not counted on election night. Absent votes are not counted until returned to their ‘home’ district. So what happened to the boxes?
The three boxes were sealed with the bundles of absent votes inside. The procedure is the boxes should have been sent to Adelaide post-election to take part in what is known as “Absent exchange”. There, like all other absent votes, the ballot papers would have been removed, sorted by district, and forward to the relevant returning officer for the home district.
But they weren’t.
So why did the returning officer not send the boxes to Adelaide? Good question.
What has happened since
When the election was over, all material in the offices of Returning Officers were returned to the Electoral Commission. This return from Stuart included the the three stray boxes of absent votes, still sealed after sorting.
With electronic roll mark off, the Electoral Commission knows how many ballot papers for each district are in the boxes. It is standard procedure in dealing with such boxes to check the mark-off with the number of ballot papers.
This is how the Commission knew how many ballot papers for each district were in the sealed ballot box. I’ll explain what’s happened since below.
Can the Votes be Included in the Count?
The answer is no. The result has been declared and the writ returned. The only way to change a result once declared is through the Court of Disputed Returns.
These boxes would not normally be counted as they have arrived too late. It is like a late arriving absent or postal vote. If a vote is not in the hands of the Returning Officer on the due date, it cannot be included in the count.
But if the late arrival of the boxes causing them to miss the deadline is the fault of electoral officials, simply saying the boxes were received late may not be an acceptable result.
Because on checking there are 81 votes for Narungga, and the margin of One Nation’s victory was only 58 votes, these votes could have changed the result.
With the result declared, these votes cannot be added to the result. The same with votes for other districts in the boxes.
But as the votes for Narungga COULD change the result, no matter how remote the chance, the Electoral Commission has to count them to be sure the declared result and elected member is a safe result.
The extra votes will become a footnote for the Narungga result, not form part of the result unless the Court of Disputed Returns rules otherwise.
If when the votes are counted it confirms One Nation’s victory with little change in the margin, the Electoral Commission is unlikely to challenge the result.
If the extra votes overturn One Nation’s victory, the Commission will immediately petition the Court of Disputed Returns on the basis that errors in the conduct of the poll affected the result. No doubt One Nation would lodge a similar petition, though probably asking the court to confirm the original result.
If the extra votes significantly narrowed One Nation’s margin of victory, it would open an opportunity for the Liberal Party to challenge the result. I understand the Liberal Party already has concerns about rejected postal votes.
What Happens Next?
The word “found” been thrown around about these extra votes, but the key question is whether the Electoral Commission knew these ballot papers existed but was simply unable to locate them
The key question is “chain of custody”. The three boxes were sealed as normal after sorting the absent ballots. The boxes should have been returned for the absent exchange but weren’t. The boxes remained sealed until returned to the Electoral Commission with all other election material.
The Commission has now opened the boxes. Absent votes are placed in a plain envelope with the name of the absent electorate written on the outside. The small number of declaration votes are also in declaration envelopes in the box.
The envelopes have been checked with roll mark-off data and they match the electronic records.
Tomorrow the votes for Narungga will be removed from the envelopes and counted.
What the Court of Disputed Returns could decide
The Court has the ability to include these extra votes in the official count, and consider any other issues raised in litigation, such as formality on disputed ballot papers and any questions on rejected postal votes.
The Court may be satisifed that the new votes do not bring the result into question and let the returned writ stand. It may also choose to admit the votes to the count without voiding the writ.
If the additional votes change the result, will the Court admit the votes and change the name of the elected member? The last time I remember that happening was in Queensland at the 1989 election when the result in Nerang Nicklin was changed the following year. A ruling on informal ballot papers changing the order of exclusion and saw the elected Liberal replaced by the National candidate.
But this is where the “chain of custody” issue becomes important. If the extra votes might change the result, if there is any doubt about chain of custody for the ballot papers, is it valid to admit the votes? And whether included or not, does it bring the result into question?
If the additional votes would change the result, the Court must decide whether to admit the votes and change the elected member, or void the result on the basis that it is unclear if the election was conducted correctly.
We will see what unfolds with the count tomorrow.
Re Chail of custoy, surely there are processes and procedures that are standard and apply to every polling place. One assumes other ballot boxes at the polling place were collected and forwarded as per procedure. How could this ballot box be omitted? When i have scrutineered the Polling booth official in charge is always very strict about processes. This is baffling.
COMMENT: This isn’t about polling places. Everything was transferred to the office of the Returning Officer. There all the absent votes were documented, accumulated, bundled together, put in boxes and sealed. At that point they boxes should have been transferred to Adelaide for the Absent exchange. They weren’t. Did head office ask where the votes were? We are yet to find out why. As these were absent votes, Stuart scrutineers wouldn’t have paid much attention.
I’m not sure how it works in SA, but I have been in charge of polling centres at the federal and state levels in a different state. The various electoral commissions can’t seem to agree on what this position is called; SA and NSW calls it “Polling Centre Manager”, Victoria calls it “Voting Centre Manager”, AEC calls it “Officer In Charge”, etc. I’ll call it “PCM” because that’s the SA term.
Scrutineers are usually gone before the last things that happen at a polling place. The very last thing that the PCM does before locking the doors and turning off the alarms is that they sign a manifest, which details (amongst other things) how many sealed boxes and satchels there are of which type are to be returned, and hand it over to someone whose job it is to return the materials to the outpost centre where sorting and the recount will take place.
When the materials arrive there, the satchels and boxes are compared with the manifest immediately, and the numbers are copied onto a separate form by the person receiving the materials.
The electoral workers who return the materials to the outpost centre and accept them on arrival started their work day at about 4pm. This is done deliberately so they are not tired; for most election workers, it’s been a very long day by this point.
I bring all this up to point out that under normal circumstances, there’s very little that can go wrong with getting ballot papers to the division counting place. Both ends of the trip are checked multiple times by people who are quite alert.
That’s not to say that nothing can go wrong. If it’s a very big electorate, materials from multiple polling centres may be consolidated into one vehicle at a temporary staging location, and the check hasn’t always been redone at that point. That’s how the box of ballots in Barton went missing at the last federal election. Now that we know it’s a risk, I can guarantee the manifest will be checked on all legs of the journey from now on.
It will be interesting to know exactly what happened. The OPC “knew” that the boxes existed in the sense that all the paperwork documenting their arrival existed. Why the number of boxes opened wasn’t matched with the number of boxes that existed is a question for the investigation.
COMMENT: These are Absent votes. They are tallied as having been taken at a polling place but not tallied by first preference so scrutineers pay little attention to them. They all go to the RO office. In this case, Stuart is a massive electorate covering half of the state and not all votes would have been returned on the Sunday. Stuart had a number of problems with staffing polling places. We know the Absents were received at the ROs office. They were sorted, bundled by home district, sealed in boxes, probably without any scrutineer observation, but not sent to ECSA Head office. I don’t know what communication then followed between the RO and ECSA head office and that’s for the inquiry to resolve. But the sealed boxes have now been uncovered when going through the returned material from the RO.
I know in the AEC’s election management system, the number of absents taken in each district is entered into a computer system so the receiving district will know how many are to come. The AEC’s absent exchange is much more de-centralised than the states’. I can’t tell you if such a reconciliation system exists in ECSA’s system. ECSA would have known some of the absent existed based on electronic roll mark-off, but probably not the total.
In 1966 a ballot box wasn’t counted in Toorak in Harold Holt’s electorate. Higgins was then safe Liberal, so it did not change the result.
COMMENT: The votes from Narungga are being counted out to test whether they would affect the declared results. The votes for the other 46 districts won’t be counted as they cannot change the result.
Surely the SAEC will need to count all of the new votes in all seats as they may affect the order of exclusion which in turn may change the 2CP and potentially (highly unlikely) the notional result?
COMMENT: I understand there are more than 30 votes each for Flinders and Giles but every other electorate has fewer votes. Even if a lower level order of exclusion changed, none of the other electorates are close enough to alter the elected member. It is the elected member that matters for the return of the writ and is the basis for any challenge. And as I said in the post, the new votes can’t be included in the count as the result has been declared.
What if any new votes affect that vote getter’s Party’s ability to obtain election funding for the next election? I hope If I have not written it correctly, you understand my point and can answer me?
COMMENT: The votes are not part of the count so don’t count for public funding. There are 642 votes, not all of which could count if admitted. I’m not sure what the per-vote funding rate is in SA, but multiply it by 642 and it won’t be a lot of money. I’m not aware of the rules in SA and whether these impact on the amount available in advance for the next election.
The Narungga ballots cast at the Port Pirie Early Voting Centre were bundled and the total number of these ballots documented. Presumably the same happened at other early voting centres and absentee votes cast on Polling Day. And someone would add up the postal votes received.
Surely ECSA makes a record of all of the votes cast in Narungga on Polling Day plus these other votes.
And surely ECSA compare these tallies with the number of physical ballots that they have counted.
And if there is a discrepancy, then surely they would investigate to find out why? Ideally, before they declare the result.
Surely?
COMMENT: A bunch of issues there. First, this has nothing to do with postal votes. It is about absent votes for other electorates cast in Stuart. Knowledge of how many votes were cast in Narungga is easy to know as the Narungga RO has the roll files and ballot papers in their possession. The same for postals. But Absent are harder to sort out as they are cast elsewhere in the state. The absent exchange is when ROs finally get their district’s absents.
Pre-poll absent were taken as ordinaries with names marked off the electronic roll. I don’t know ECSA procedures precisely and don’t know if electronic mark-off was used for Absent votes in polliong places. If it wasn’t then would be declaration votes and their existence would not necessarily be known to ECSA head office until returned.
As I understand it, the Absent votes went to the RO office in Port Augusta. They were sorted and accumulated by home district and sealed in boxes. They should have then been sent to Adelaide for the absent exchange but weren’t.
I do not know what communication occurred between ECSA head office and the RO in Port Augusta. There will be an inquiry into what went wrong when we should find out who knew what when. Why the RO didn’t forward the Absent boxes as required is the first question before moving on to what follow-up occurred.
I presume ECSA had some knowledge that some Absent votes had not been received in Narungga. The timetable to complete the count is tight and can’t be delayed while the state is scoured looking for missing votes. These votes have only been found in the last two days, well after the count was completed. As I said, the starting question is why the boxes weren’t returned after the initial sorting on Port Augusta. I can’t offer much further explanation.
There’s obviously some missing/deficient processes at the absent exchange where they’re not keeping track of received boxes. Surely someone there would have noticed that they’d only received absent votes from forty-six electorates?
COMMENT: I’m sure they did and a question was probably asked but I can’t say it was. And if asked, I can’t tell you what the RO replied. It’s for the inquiry to work out, not for me to speculate.
We got a bit of a preview of this with Bradfield last year. Fortunately neither government nor opposition will be decided on the Narungga result. That said, it would be an interesting test case if the result was change or the margin drew within 10 votes. I assume the preferred result would be for the Court to declare one of the two candidates elected in the end. Last year there was some talk about the possibility of rerunning the Bradfield election. I am not sure how fair that would be as voters now have after the fact knowledge of the results.
In Canada there was one seat that was declared decided by one vote in last year’s election. After a long winding process the seat was ultimately vacated due to postal ballot misprints on the envelopes. A by election was called which took place coinciding with two other by elections. As it turns out, majority government hung on the balance of these three seats.
Unlike preference counting, this problem is one of human error (most likely). An unfortunate circumstance you have controls in place to eliminate but it is not perfect.
In Canada the Liberals only needed to win one of the three Monday by-elections to gain a majority in Parliament.
Given 2 of the 3 seats were in heavy Liberal seats (which they won easily with well over 60% of the vote) the result in Terrebonne didn’t matter as far as the Parliamentary majority was concerned. It didn’t make the majority but added to it.
To me it sounds a bit fishy!!! I hope they do a better job this time!!!
COMMENT: More a complete stuff-up. The problem occurred with absent votes in another electorate so it wasn’t about the count in Narungga. It was several days into the Narungga count before it became clear the result would be close.
Antony thanks again for another informative and helpful article. You mentioned that the last time you recall this occurring was in Nerang in Queensland 1989/90. The case was Turner v King, but I think the electorate was actually Nicklin.
COMMENT: Of course. I went off my memory and got the election and the electorate’s first letter right but the full name wrong. Will fix.
I presume that the most likely way this smallish number of votes could make a real difference, would be for it to have an impact on a couple of the lower order candidate exclusions, which might then significantly change some preference flows?
How close were the exclusions down the ballot?
COMMENT: The gap between Fraser Ellis and Labor was 109 votes by the time Labor was excluded and that couldn’t be overturned. Anyway, this would be simply a matter of their order of exclusion and not alter the fact both would be excluded before the close final race between Liberal and One Nation.
Thanks, Antony for your analysis and explanation.
However, I agree with Robert Stephenson about missing ballots affecting the order of exclusion in OTHER seats. No longer is it basicly a two-party run-off. These missing ballots CAN change results as order of exclusion now matters in numerous electorates.
1. In Ngadjuri, if ALP had been narrowly excluded before Libs, (where Libs JUST missed out on final 2PP count by a small number of votes), then ONP would have lost by a wide margin. This is because very few of Tony Picollo’s ALP preferences flowed to ONP, whereas following Lib exclusion, Lib preferences (bizarrely in my opinion) put ONP in.
2. In Heyson the Greens were JUST excluded before Labor, which would have completely changed the final 2PP count.
3. And remember in Finniss, Lou Nicholson won from fourth place, showing how important order of exclusion is and that every vote counts, in every electorate; even those with a (supposedly) clear final 2PP margin.
it is no longer just a two-party world. If a stuff-up like this results in the wrong two candidates being identified for the final 2PP count then the wrongly excluded candidates’ preference flows are allocated and the wrong results made.
COMMENT: The number of located votes per seat averaged 10. I’m not sure what count you are referring to for Ngadjuri but the Liberals did not narrowly miss the final two – the gap was more than 2,000 votes. The key count you refer to in Heysen was Labor leading the Greens and the gap was 101 votes. In Finniss the key exclusion had a gap of around 400. Ten votes would have had no impact on the order of exclusion or winning candidate in these or any other seat.
Many years ago in a council election where I used to live one ballot box for a single ward wasn’t counted because it was inadvertently put under a table. It was a full council election with 34 wards being counted so a busy night for everyone.
Before the results was announced (candidates and agents get to see first) there were a couple of questions of “the number seems low are you sure” but the Returning Officer declared the result.
The box was found and the RO made a referral to the High Court which said the box must be opened and the ward recounted. It made no difference to the result but caused some embarrassment for the RO who was also the councils Chief Executive. The £ 10,000 court costs were paid for by the ROs personal insurance.
In the UK the RO is personally responsible for the conduct of elections and is paid a fee for every election they conduct.
Mistakes happen in elections all over the world.
COMMENT: A very different counting system in the UK because the votes are all brought in and counted centrally. That was abandoned in Australia in the 19th century due to the physical size of Australian electoral districts, replaced by local counting and subsequent check counting. Absent and postal voting have complicated Australian counting even further.
The UK doesn’t have absent voting so the problem in SA wouldn’t occur in the UK. But as your example with the misplaced ballot box shows, the principle is the same. Deadline on when votes must be present for counting and a resort to the courts to change the result. UK just has a much earlier deadline on everything to do with counting.
As someone who worked in an electorates returning office at all State and local elections since 2015 it is very strange to read this – must be different system in land of the croweater!! In Qld each returning officers gets a list by the Monday after the election of the number of declaration/absent/handed in postal votes they are going to receive from each on the other electorates – this comes from the computer records of electors being marked off. By the Friday of this week the returning officers of all the other electorates would have been calling the Stirling person saying. – Mate where are my votes ??
COMMENT: The SA Electoral Commission is a much smaller body than commissions elsewhere. From my observations it seems to have a less sophisticated Election Management System (EMS) than Queensland or the AEC. I know both the ECQ and AEC have strong tracking of ballot papers that must be transferred, perhaps reflecting size and a more dispersed population. SA really is a city state and the fact this problem has arisen in Stuart, the largest electorate in the state, one with significant transport issues and staff shortages, is perhaps not surprising. There are only 8 electorates more than a three hour drive from Adelaide.
It also appears to me that Returning Officers operate a little more independently in SA. Why did the rural electorate of MacKillop not report updates for days on end when counting was clearly taking place. RO’s made reporting and data entry errors that should have been picked up on entry rather than being allowed through to the results system. I was sending e-mails to ECSA most days during counting when I spotted errors.
On the reporting issue, there were three problems in 2026. First the 2026 election was the first where pre-poll votes were ordinary votes and counted on the night. Previously rolls had to be scanned before postals and pre-polls were counted. For the first time ‘Declaration Votes’ were split into separate categories, postals, absent, pre-poll declaration etc. Some RO’s got into a muddle as to which count should be entered into which category.
Second, the rise of One Nation meant around two-thirds of electorates had their preference throws re-done on the Monday. I think that caused confusion and delayed and disrupted the check count of polling day results putting all results back a few days.
Finally, SA still does an amalgamation count before distributing preferences. In some electorates that identified some data entry issues on category votes entry. It also identified more informals. The final primary count is the first preference line in the distribution of preferences table. This may not add to the total votes by polling places, but the amalgamation count makes it difficult to go back and correct the primaries by polling place, which is why the ECSA site does not currently add up correctly. Something that has to be fixed post election with reference back to the paperwork.
With such a close outcome one wonders how the ON and Lib scrutineers missed the votes.
Bradfield was similarly close at the last federal election and the scrutineers and AEC officials were meticulous in ensuring the legitimacy of the count.
Scrutineers are not going to “miss” these votes since they didn’t know they existed in the first place. In fact, few people would, except the RO staff, who would see a report on the expected number of votes and notice a discrepancy. These were absent votes cast outside the voter’s home, so only they and the location where they voted know they exist. It surely is a problem, but a physically small one. And only a problem if a contest is extremely tight.
All that said, it does make one think, especially given the decline of classic contests, whether there is a way to update the counting system to eliminate all this physical work. Cost and practical considerations are probably significant impediments. There can be a system in which ballots are scanned electronically after a voter finishes voting, and the information is recorded. Once time is up, staff can begin the count, which for a computer would be nearly instantaneous. Then the rest of the time would be spent sorting through errors, informals, rejects, etc. A robust computer program could run throws for every combination of candidates on the ballot paper in short order. One can dream.
COMMENT: One of the other commentators spoke about the situation in Queensland where there was much more information about absent votes available to ROs, where they were cast and where they will be returned to. A consequence of the 2013 WA Senate missing ballot papers was greater attention to tracking the transport of ballot papers. The failure here is not in Narungga which was a close seat, but in Stuart, a seat where the result was clear. Stuart is also a geographically giant seat with transport issues. Which shows you need attention to securing all votes wherever they are cast, not just in the close seats.
What you describe in your second paragraph is how a lot of voting is done in the US. The standard US system these days is a roll mark-off system, a voting computer which prints a hard copy of the vote, and a scanning system read the ballot paper and tabulate votes.
The problem with this model is the cost of equipment. In the US, the volume of elections held on one day makes hand counting impossible. Hand counting is cheaper here than the alternative. But as NSW has shown, Senate scanning has shown, and experiments in Victoria have shown, moving to scanning and data entry as the check count deals with a lot of problems on accuracy in the count and dealing with complex preference distributions. First count by hand as a set of batch totals for each count centre, then a transfer to electronic format at the check count. As the re-count in Ryde at the 2023 NSW election has shown, there are enough audit trails to make re-counts work.
It is an unpopular view, but I still argue it is time to trial electronic voting for pre-poll. It does not have to rolled out for all polling places, but should at least be trialled. It solves the massive counting problem on election night, allows results to be known earlier, and allows more votes to be counted by adding other district pre-polls. I doubt we will see electronic voting in polling places in my lifetime, but I do expect electronic voting to roll out for pre-poll votes. It is already used for two-thirds of votes at ACT elections.
I assume that the issue only occurred with lower house ballots, as the ECSA has not mentioned upper house ballots.
One can imagine a hypothetical situation involving narrow margins/exclusion points where ballots discovered post-button press alter the outcome, which would be awkward.
COMMENT: The count has not finished for the LC so it is possible for these votes to be included. I’m not sure what will happen with them. It is open for them to be challenged.
Hold fast on victory being declared, more votes discovered!
This is really undermining trust in the system. that votes seem to come out of the ether, it will be claimed that the election is fake and rigged if they don’t get on top of this poor accounting practice in the electoral system.
COMMENT: The story has leaked from somewhere today. The votes were a small number of Absent votes taken in Newland and Enfield and discovered a week or two ago. There were at most a handful of votes that failed to make it into the count as Absent votes for other districts. This is the second stuff up with Absent votes, embarrassing for ECSA.
Antony, another batch of misplaced ballots found today! There’ll be an inquiry into the ECSA now, surely.
COMMENT: It has already been decided that there will be an inquiry.
Antony any updates on lower house numbers for the Legislative council which are available on today or on monday.
COMMENT: It will be the week starting Monday 17 April. I understand Friday 1 May is the like date.
Latest news on the SA debacle is:
Former Australia electoral commissioner Tom Rogers will lead a “sweeping independent review” of the management and oversight of last month’s SA state election.
Antony any updates on lower house numbers for the Legislative council which are available on today as it’s the day when the results are declared?
COMMENT: I’m not quite sure what you’re asking. I understand final candidate and group totals as well as the distribution of preferences for the Legislative Council will be released on Monday. I would be surprised if upper house figures are published by lower house electorate on Monday.