The booths are empty, the barbecues packed away and politicians are nursing their headaches from the election night parties — yet the count continues for election workers and scrutineers.
Australian Electoral Officer for the Northern Territory operations director Geoff Bloom said even after a new government had been called, Australian Electoral Commission workers would continue to calculate the final tally.
“We still count, we don’t have a day off – there’s no such luxury,” Mr Bloom said.
Mr Bloom said vote counters would start sorting through around 8000 postal votes across the Territory on Sunday.
He said declaration vote counts, including those initially not found on the roll or those voting outside their electorate, would be tallied over the next two weeks.
“So the interstate visitors that have come into the Northern Territory and cast their vote, we do a sort of those envelopes and we start to get them ready to be sent back to their home divisions right around Australia,” Mr Bloom said.
The election official said the “vast majority of votes” in the Territory were cast well before booths opened on Saturday’s election day.
The AEC said more than a third of the Territory skipped the election day hype, opting for pre-poll, mobile booths and postal votes.
Two days before the election 36 per cent of Solomon and 27 per cent of Lingiari had cast their vote.
Mr Bloom said Saturday had been a busy night for the election monitoring team.
“Every vote that we have in our hands now, apart from the envelopes, will be counted tonight (Saturday),” he said.
Mr Bloom said 40,000 votes were counted in the Darwin pre-polling centre in the six hours between polls closing and midnight.
