Chapter 5 - Processing the results
As soon as polling booths closed at 6 pm, electoral officers commenced the scrutiny and count of all ordinary ballot papers cast on polling day.
Before staff can head home after their full day shifts, almost 1.4 million ballot papers need to be scrutinised and counted, and the results added to ECSA’s systems and transmitted to the website and media.
In the busy days that follow, all ballot papers scrutinised and counted on election night are rechecked, along with any additional declaration votes admitted and included in the counts. The recheck continues until all postal votes received up until the deadline of 7 days after polling day are included.
Meanwhile, the Legislative Council (LC) recheck takes much longer, with nearly 450,000 ballot papers securely transferred to the scanning centre, where they are scanned and data entered.
In all, nearly 2.3 million ballot papers must be securely stored, counted, checked, and then transferred for safe storage in these busy weeks. ECSA staff work tirelessly to ensure the accuracy of the results, observed throughout by scrutineers who ensure the transparency of the process at polling booths, returning officers’ premises, the central processing centre, the LC counting centre, and the scanning centre.
In Chapter 5 - Processing the results...
Election night counting
Counting began soon after polling booths closed at 6 pm. After a busy day of taking votes, the electoral officers set themselves for the task of conducting 3 separate counts of the ordinary votes issued at their booth on polling day:
After the first preference votes of House of Assembly ballot papers were counted, a 2CP count was undertaken with preferences distributed to the 2 candidates considered most likely to be in the lead. A sealed envelope with the names of the 2 preferred candidates is provided to polling booth managers with the instruction that the envelope cannot be opened until after 6 pm. This count provides an early indication of the election results, and a snapshot of preference flows for political parties and the media.
At some polling booths, electoral officers worked late into Saturday night to ensure all ordinary votes were counted.
ABOVE: Electoral officers counting votes in Unley
Rechecks and two-party preferred counts
ECSA has mandated that all ordinary votes counted on polling night must be rechecked. On the Sunday after polling day, returning officers conducted a recheck of all ordinary House of Assembly ballot papers for all booths, including an assessment of informal and undetermined ballot papers to see if they complied with candidates’ voting tickets.
This was followed by two-party preferred (2PP) counts for each polling booth to show how the vote was divided between the Labor and Liberal parties, taking into account the preferences of people who had voted for other parties and independents.
A 2PP count was also performed on the following Saturday on all declaration votes admitted to the count.
For any district where the outcome is not likely to be a Labor/Liberal contest, additional 2CP rechecks of declaration counts are undertaken.
Declaration vote count
Over the week following polling day, returning officers processed all declaration votes received in their districts. After setting aside any rejected envelopes, staff removed the declaration flaps from the accepted envelopes before opening them and counting the ballot papers. The counts were conducted in the same manner as the ordinary ballot paper recheck counts.
Because postal votes could be received up to 7 days after polling day, the final declaration vote count was not held until Saturday 26 March.
ECSA plans to start counting and reporting the results of postal voting, mobile polling, and other voting services separately at future elections. And if Recommendations 14 and 17 are taken up by Parliament, ECSA will also start counting and publishing the results of early voting and absent ordinary voting separately, allowing a complete breakdown of the results according to the different voting methods in each electoral district.
A CALL FOR LEGISLATIVE CHANGE |
Counting ordinary early votes on polling day
As the number of declaration votes increases at state elections, the counting process becomes more drawn out, and the more likely it becomes that results in close elections remain unknown for several days. In its 2018 State Election Report, ECSA recognised that a situation could arise at a close election with a large number of declaration votes where South Australians might have to wait for a week after polling day to know the outcome of the election due to the extra time needed for the count.
The current declaration vote scrutiny process cannot take place until the week after polling day once the electronic rolls have been checked, any marked hard-copy rolls are scanned, and all declaration envelopes transferred and delivered to each returning officer. A number of jurisdictions – the Commonwealth, NZ, the ACT, the NT, Queensland, Tasmania and Victoria – have helped resolve this problem by issuing the majority of early votes as ordinary votes and then counting these on polling day. ECSA once again recommends this approach be adopted in South Australia and seeks legislative change to do so.
As discussed in the call for legislative change in recommendation 14, if ECSA is permitted to issue ordinary votes to electors at an EVC designated for their electoral district, this will ensure that these ordinary votes can be counted on polling day.
Following the New Zealand model, these ordinary votes would be counted before 6 pm on polling day in a restricted area under tight security conditions to guarantee the secrecy of the count until after polls close.
This would result in a much larger number of votes being included in the results reported on election night and provide the public with greater knowledge of the outcome of the election that same night.
The reduced number of absent early votes cast by electors at EVCs not designated for their districts, as well as the even smaller number of early votes issued as declaration votes to silent electors and to electors who could not be found on the roll, would be transferred to the relevant district returning officer, where they would be processed and counted in the week after polling day. The declaration votes would, as usual, be closely scrutinised to ensure their validity before their inclusion in the count.
Recommendation 18.
That the Electoral Act be amended to allow the scrutiny to commence before the close of polling so that ordinary votes cast by electors at early voting centres that have been designated for their electoral district (if Recommendation 14 is taken up by Parliament) can be scrutinised and counted on polling day under suitably tight security conditions to guarantee the secrecy of the count until after the close of poll.
Legislative council count
The counting and processing of results for the Legislative Council election is always a complex undertaking. The single transferable vote system used for the election, the large numbers of candidates with preferences to distribute, along with the choice of 2 voting options on the ballot paper, invariably make for a laborious process. In total, 1,129,680 ballot papers were scrutinised to determine which of the 51 candidates were elected to the 11 available vacancies.
At polling booths on election night, electoral officers conducted a first preference count of the Legislative Council ordinary votes. Over the next 2 days, ordinary ballot papers were securely transferred from polling booths around the state to the central processing centre, where they were manually rechecked, district by district, by a team of over 75 staff. Ballot papers with a single group preference marked above the line were totalled (681,633, or 60.3% of all ballot papers) and stored for loading into the counting system. All ballot papers marked below the line or with multiple preferences above the line, as well as any ballot papers where there was any confusion about the voter’s intentions, were batched and then transferred securely to the scanning centre.
The same process was repeated the second week after polling day with declaration votes, which were transferred to the counting centre once the deadline for postal votes to be returned had passed and each returning officer had conducted their first preference counts for their district.
Scrutineers were able to attend both the counting and scanning centres to observe the processes.
Consistent with the election in 2018, the 2022 State Election again saw a high proportion of ballot papers that were too complex for manual counting. Whereas at previous elections, data entry was used to count ballots marked below the line, since 2018 the sheer volume of ballot papers with multiple preferences and the impracticality of data entering so many has necessitated the use of scanning. A further increase was expected in 2022, so the scanning centre was engaged by ECSA again. Overall, the scanning centre processed 340,679 ballot papers with multiple preferences above the line (30.2% of all ballot papers), 66,528 ballot papers marked below the line (5.9%), and 40,840 ballot papers initially assessed as informal (3.6%). In total, there were 448,047 ballot papers requiring data entry and scanning (39.7% of the total), a similar figure to the 2018 figure of 460,534 ballot papers (42.0% of the total). The process took 5 weeks.
After checking and confirming the total figures for every polling place and declaration count, ECSA staff loaded the details of every batch of ballot papers into the LC count software. On 27 April, 39 days after polling day, the Deputy Electoral Commissioner ran the LC count software and conducted the declaration of the poll to announce the 11 successful candidates. A total of 8,117 counts were conducted in just a few short minutes to deliver the results.
Modernising electoral services - Digitisation of election forms
At each state election, thousands of forms are completed by staff, who record information about the actions taken at each stage of voting and counting in locations across the state. These forms are important for recording information associated with the operational side of elections in a uniform way and assisting with identifying the exact nature of operations at each location.
A vast number of election forms have been developed over the decades, with many of these remarkably similar to the forms electoral officers completed half a century ago, not just in their content and appearance but in the way they are completed. Election forms are just one example of how many of ECSA’s key business practices remain paper based. While technology has advanced considerably since the 1970s, radically transforming how South Australian businesses and government agencies conduct basic business transactions, ECSA’s use of pen and paper election forms has not.
This gives rise to problems: sometimes forms are filled in poorly, leaving ECSA with incomplete or inaccurate data; sometimes pen-and-paper forms go missing; and finally, all the valuable information contained in the pen-and-paper forms is to all intents and purposes useless for analytical purposes, as it needs to be manually data-entered into ECSA’s systems. Over the next few years, ECSA plans to digitise the majority of its pen-and-paper election forms. Electronic forms will have multiple benefits: poor form completion can be improved through the use of in-built features such as auto filling and calculated fields; information entered on digital forms will be available instantly, allowing Electoral Commission staff access and visibility in real time over counting and other election processes in the field; and finally, information on forms will be retained digitally for posterior analysis. Now that all returning officers and polling place staff use laptops to look up and mark electors off the roll, it makes sense to also move ECSA’s election forms into the digital age.
Results capture and reporting
On election night, polling booth managers relayed the results of their count to their ROs, who checked and entered them into the election results system.
Monitoring of results processing was managed centrally by ECSA to assist in identifying delays or possible discrepancies.
Over the following days, the results for polling booth rechecks, 2PP, and declaration vote counts were entered by ROs as they were undertaken, until the final declaration count later that week. Results were updated following the distribution of preferences conducted on the second Sunday after polling day.
At no time are ECSA’s ICT systems more important than on election night when the results are entered and transmitted to the ECSA website and the media. To ensure a reliable election night experience, considerable testing and redundancies were built into the results applications.
This included 2 full result entry trials in the week before polling day to load test and check the operation and accuracy of the system. This testing ensured that ECSA’s technology was ready to go, working flawlessly on election night without any website or application outages.
Results dissemination
Election results were automatically updated from the election results system to the ECSA website, allowing the public to view results in real time. A direct feed was also provided to the media up until the counting was completed, allowing television networks and media organisations to use the direct feed of results to support their election reports and broadcasts.
The process of reporting ran smoothly with no outages or technical difficulties, even with the website receiving more than 400,000 hits on the afternoon and evening of polling day.
The final House of Assembly results were published on the website for all districts following the distribution of preference counts on Sunday 27 March. The final results for the Legislative Council were published after the declaration of the poll on Wednesday 27 April 2022.
ABOVE: Screenshot of results website
Ticket voting
XTicket voting for the House of Assembly is one of the unique features of South Australian elections. Because voters in South Australia must indicate preferences for all candidates on the ballot paper if they wish their vote to be counted, there is potential for a high number of informal ballots. Voting tickets lodged by candidates serve as a ‘savings provision’ for votes that would otherwise be informal.XX
House of Assembly ballot papers marked with a single 1, ✔ (tick) or ❌ (cross), or partially completed with consecutive preferences consistent with a voting ticket lodged by a candidate are accepted as formal ballot papers and attributed to the candidate for whom the first preference is marked.
Two candidates (0.8%) did not lodge a voting ticket for the election, compared to 8 in 2018 (3%).
In 2018, they represented 3.8% of all formal ballot papers. The highest rate of ticket voting was 7.7% in the district of Bragg, with the lowest rate of 2.1% being recorded in the district of Kavel.
Declaration of results
The results for the 47 House of Assembly districts were declared during the week of 28 March while the declaration of the results for the Legislative Council was conducted on 27 April 2022.
ABOVE: Peter Malinauskas, Member of the House of Assembly for the division of Croydon
Return of the writs
The writs were returned to the Governor of South Australia, Her Excellency the Honourable Frances Adamson AC, on 29 April 2022 at Government House.
ABOVE: House of Assembly writ returned to the Governor of South Australia on 29 April 2022
ABOVE: Legislative Council writ returned to the Governor of South Australia on 29 April 2022
ABOVE: The writs being returned to the Governor of South Australia, Her Excellency the Honourable Frances Adamson AC (left), on 29 April 2022, by Electoral Commissioner Mick Sherry (centre), and Deputy Commissioner David Gully (right)
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