The outcome of the final Senate spot in Victoria is still up for grabs for Greens candidate Richard di Natale, with a possible recount on the cards.
We have been scrutineering at most polling booths since election day, and have picked up a number of inconsistencies, mistakes and misattributed votes.
In the electorate of Wills, 309 Greens Senate votes from one booth were not recorded at all; in Isaacs 150 votes were missed; in Dunkley 173 Greens votes were recorded as 17; and in Gellibrand, some Greens votes were attributed to another minor party.
There could be as few as 5000 votes in it at the end, out of 3.5 million, and we’ve found 500 just from our scrutineering. There have also been inconsistencies in the way votes were counted across different electorates, with some ruled informal when they should not have been, and others counted when they should have been ruled informal.
Most of these errors favour the major parties, not us. On the basis of that, we’re preparing to mount a formal challenge to the AEC.
We’ll keep you up-to-date with the figures/decisions as they come in here at GreensBlog.
I really hope both Richard and the ALP candidate can get up!
I have been in New Zealand for 12 days, so could someone please inform me as to how many Green Senators have been elected??? By the way, there is a Green Taxi Company available in Wellington, who are using Toyota Prius vehicles! Are there any Australian Taxi Companies doing this yet??? I would love to hear your opinions about both of my topics.
Brenton, the button was pushed on the AEC computer this afternoon in SA and Sarah Hanson-Young officially elected. Tomorrow the AEC will do their thang in WA, and we are super confident that Scott Ludlam will be elected. In TAS, Bob was elected on primaries - over 18% and a record minor party vote!
In NSW we have lost Kerry Nettle.
So we look to have 5 with our 2 sitting Senators (Christine in TAS and Rachel in WA), unless Richard can get over the line in VIC.
And on the Green Taxi side of things - Perth & Sydney are the only places I’ve heard of operating Green Taxi programs.
Thanks Tim H. and Tim N. for your information. Fabulous to have a Greens Senator in South Australia!!!!! I went on a tour of New Zealand’s Parliament House and was shown where the NZ Greens are seated in the chamber. Met lots of Green voters in Wellington, who all seemed to be pleased for us that the Howard Government was defeated.
Thanks so much for this update. Is it just me? - I find the fact that with all the amazing technology available to us these days, that such mistakes in counting can happen, is shocking quite frankly. These types of errors should not be happening. I hope there is a re-count. I am sad though, that we did not pick up more seats than we did. I will pray for Richard to cross the line, but it doesn’t seem all that hopeful from what I have read.
love and light
susan in Tasmania xxxx
PS - I do apologise for the change of name on a couple of my more recent posts, I got sick of not having an avatar and hadn’t used wordpress before. Yep, hard to believe - like where have I been LOL, but I think I have it right now with my name AND pic showing. I just think it is so much friendlier with a face by the name. But sorry for the juggling a bit.
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Why is it that we don’t use electronic voting? Paper would be saved and results would be instantaneous and accurate.
Scott Ludlam has now been officially elected, too, so we have cemented official party status!
Now if only Richard could get over the line, too…
MarioM, it’s a point worth discussing, but my gut reaction is that electronic voting is hugely open to fraud, as has been demonstrated now several times in the USA. However, I did have a very interesting conversation recently with someone who suggested lectronic scanning of paper votes - sure it wouldn’t save the paper, but it would speed up the process hugely and cut out a lot of potential for human error. You could do the old ‘colour in the relevant dots with your 2B pencil’ thing.
Congratulations on the Greens senate success.
I really like the idea of there being a paper trail with voting, and it being subject to scrutiny by human eyes. Electronic voting, and electronic counting opens us up to the risk of election results being hacked, and an increase in fraud that we are unaware of. As it is, the senate count already involves a large amount of trust being placed in the hands of a computer program.
A colour in the dots voting method would make little difference to the speed of the count, as the main delay is waiting for postal results to arrive from far flung corners of the globe. Scrutineers would have a field day, is that dot pencil, or is it fly dirt, or a printing error? It would also make it harder to detect widespread voting irregularities, like 200 votes at one booth with identical preferences, all seemingly in the same hand writing.
Thanks Tim H. for the news on the WA Senate result. Does everyone notice the Rush to report the Green Senate results in the Australian media. The Age seem to be the only outlet to keep the reading public up to date. The ABC is a disgrace!!!!!
A friend of mine who is a librarian by profession (ie highly skilled in cataloging and the process of managing long data entry processes) worked on election night for the AEC at a NSW polling booth.
With 79 candidates and 25 groupings on the ticket, the tickets were huge and it took AEC staff nearly 3 hours just to unfold them. Only then could the process of counting begin, and you can imagine how complex it was.
My point in relating this is that human error is normal and no system on earth can remove it, so no, I don’t find it shocking that there is some, as long as there are processes in place to ensure that errors are spotted and rectified. In Australia, the AEC doesn’t just count any poll once no matter how clear the outcome might seem. All votes are counted at least twice. In addition to the AECs counters and scrutineers, there are Party and independent scrutineers who spot further errors. I would argue strongly that the only way you can ensure that error can be removed is to have hardcopy completed ballots that can be recounted as many times as necessary to remove errors.
For those who think electronic voting in some form would be good, as Tim notes above, it’s hugely open to voter fraud and just as likely to produce errors. I’m not even particularly enamored with the idea of filling in dots with a pencil prior to scanning, as this system is also prone to errors and still requires human interpretation of what is a filled in dot etc.
Perhaps more relevant is that Australia’s population makes paper ballots as we now have them entirely feasible - it’s understandable that a country like the USA with 300 million and therefore probably 100 million voters wants an electronic system. But Canada last I looked, like us, still uses paper ballots with great success and they’ve got double the population we do.
So to cut my post down to a single line - it’s not broke, let’s not “fix” it (with all the connotations that has in politics!).