New complex Upper House voting system means a month before full results are known
THE new “complex” Upper House voting system will keep the state waiting for about a month to find out its new legislators, deputy Electoral Commissioner David Gully says.
SA 2018
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THE new “complex” Upper House voting system will keep the state waiting for about a month to find out its new legislators, deputy Electoral Commissioner David Gully says.
He said the new system, which mirrors the method used in the Senate, was easier for voters but increasingly difficult for Electoral Commission staff to easily determine a result.
“It’s an easier process for voters but a more difficult process to get the votes and count them and get a result,” he said.
“Come look at a million ballot papers with a dozen preferences on them. It’s a massive task, it’s not an easy task at all.
“The important thing is to get it right because it’s very expensive to run an election again.”
Mr Gully said a result would be known by mid April or “one or two days before then”.
Almost 300,000 pre-poll and absentee votes will not be received by Upper House vote counters until the end of next week, once Lower House counting had been finalised.
Mr Gully said the old system, which saw preferences flow according to deals struck between the parties, saw only about 4 per cent of votes required ballot papers to be sent away, but that had increased tenfold under the new system.
The delay in counting the vote is likely to frustrate Premier Steven Marshall’s plan to finalise the new Parliament’s sitting calendar inside his first 10 days in office.
The Legislative Council will not be able to sit until the 11 new Upper House MPs have been formally declared.
With 66 per cent of the vote counted, the Liberal Party is likely to win four Upper House seats, SA Best two, and the Greens one.
The Labor Party will win at least three, with the last to come down to a tussle between it and the Australian Conservatives.
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