When Britain voted to leave the EU, it took less than seven hours for the result to be announced. Australia voted in a federal election on Saturday and still doesn’t know the make-up of its next parliament – or even which party will be in government. Why is it taking so long to get a result?
What votes were counted on election night?
On election night, the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) counted all of the votes cast at polling booths on election day, and at pre-poll booths, in the voter’s home electorate. No postal votes or votes cast outside of the voter’s home electorate were counted on election night.
After counting the primary votes for the House of Representatives, the AEC then distributed preferences between the two candidates it believed were most likely to be the final two candidates standing in each seat.
Senate votes were also counted at each local booth (although pre-poll votes were not counted at this time). Senate votes were roughly sorted into piles for each group, so we don’t currently know how many of these votes were below-the-line votes for each candidate, and how many were above-the-line votes for the group.
What is being counted now?
For the House of Representatives, the following batches of votes – called declaration votes – are now being counted:
- postal votes
- pre-poll votes cast outside the home electorate
- votes cast on election day outside the home electorate
- provisional votes (we’ll come back to explain these)
Declaration votes also need to be counted for the Senate (as well as all of the other pre-poll votes).
Once all of these Senate votes have been tallied up, they are scanned into AEC computers to record all the preferences on each vote.
Why was there no counting on Sunday or Monday?
Traditionally the counting of declaration votes begins the day after the election. As a response to the loss of ballot papers in Western Australia in 2013, the AEC has cracked down on its processes for transporting ballot papers between electorates, and they now take two days after election day to bring declaration votes to the right place, and check that everything is in order before they begin counting these votes.
Declaration votes include pre-poll and absent votes which were cast in places outside the voter’s electorate, and these votes need to be securely transported to the voter’s electorate in a way which ensures no ballots are misplaced or can be tampered with.
What do they need to check?
For each postal, absent and absent pre-poll vote, the ballot paper is contained in an envelope with the voter’s details on the outside.
The AEC needs to check the person has not already voted and check off the envelope before it can be opened and counted.
There will also be a small number of provisional votes for voters whose right to vote was unclear, and the voter’s eligibility needs to be confirmed before either counting or discarding the vote.
Is that all the counting that’s going on?
Not quite. In a few seats, the AEC made a mistake on election night and conducted a count between two candidates who didn’t end up being the final two candidates.
In these seats, the AEC is now revisiting all of the votes counted on election night and distributing them between the two candidates who now appear likely to be the top two.
In two of these seats, it appeared unclear as to who would win before this preference count: in Cowper, the race is between the Nationals’ Luke Hartsuyker and independent Rob Oakeshott; and in Grey the race is between Liberal MP Rowan Ramsey and the Nick Xenophon Team’s Andrea Broadfoot. At this point it appears likely the Coalition candidate will win in both seats, but some preferences from some booths are yet to be counted.
When might we know the results?
The number of undecided House of Representatives seats is narrowing every day, and by the end of this week we should know who is likely to win all 150 seats. Having said that, some postal votes may arrive up 13 days after election day, so if a seat is extremely close it could remain undecided for some time.
For the Senate it will take at least a few weeks for all the votes to be data entered, and as this process goes along we’ll have a clearer idea of who is in with a chance of winning a seat, but we probably won’t know the winner of the last seat in each state until the AEC “pushes the button” to distribute the preferences, which will probably take place about two weeks from now.
If no party gains an outright majority in the House of Representatives, then negotiations with the crossbenchers begin in earnest and whichever party succeeds in winning the required number over will form a minority government. It took Labor’s Julia Gillard 17 days to reach a deal with the crossbench after the 2010 election delivered a hung parliament. So Australia could be in political limbo for a while yet.
