Gold Coast council election: Inquiry makes no recommendations after results bungled

The reason behind what caused March’s farcical council election count - where the results of crucial mayoral and ward battles was not known for hours - has been revealed. But an inquiry into the farce has made a surprising recommendation.

AN inquiry into the bungled posting of council election results has revealed what happened in the led up to mass failure but made no recommendations beyond calling on the parliament to “note the contents” of its report.

It comes after political parties and stakeholders made critical submissions to the inquiry about the March 28 election night, where results took hours to be posted onto the Electoral Commission of Queensland’s website.

Candidates and constituents were left flying blind for hours with no visibility of who was winning crucial wards and mayoralties.

The inquiry heard that the ECQ decided to abandon its initial election management system about a week before election day after test results found “unacceptable load times” as well as “failures to load”.

Council election votes were bungled online.

The ECQ instead moved to its contingency plan just days out from polling day and decided to use a “‘backup’ ECQ results presentation website” instead.

According to the inquiry’s report, data formatting issues were identified in the first hour after polls closed, while most results were not published until 11pm and all available results data was not publicly available until 11.45pm.

The only recommendation the committee made was for the parliament to note the contents of its report.

The inquiry pointed out that a “considerable number” of stakeholders who made submissions were concerned with the ECQ’s delayed posting of election results.

Another area of concern that emerged, according to the inquiry, was a “perception” that the ECQ did not provide frequent or timely enough communications to candidates, parties and the community.

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“The prohibition on having scrutineers for the preliminary count on election night, attributable to COVID-19 social distancing directives, was also a theme that arose in the submissions received from representative groups, political parties and others,” the inquiry noted in its report.

“Submitters lamented that scrutineers for the preliminary count could have been a reliable source of preliminary count data in the absence of regular updates to the website.”

The committee noted that the ECQ was now implementing a strategy to secure the system’s stability for the October state election and that an “enhanced governance structure” had been put in place.

The inquiry’s report said there was no suggestion that the integrity of the voting process or the legitimacy of the results were in anyway compromised by the technical issues.

Originally published as Gold Coast council election: Inquiry makes no recommendations after results bungled