Calls for ballot counting system to change as early voters rush to polls in Northern Territory

A POLITICAL analyst has said the ongoing surge of early voters suggests there should be a change in how votes are counted

THE ongoing surge in people voting early or by post means electoral commissions should be allowed to lock scrutineers in a room a few hours before polls close on election day to count ballots quicker, a political analyst has said.

The proposal by Queensland University of Technology politics professor John Mickel, is supported by the NT Electoral Commission (NTEC) but won’t happen this year as the suggestion was knocked back when electoral laws were last reformed.

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It comes as the NTEC confirmed 15.7 per cent, or 22,198, of all Territory voters had already voted or would be doing so via mail, just two days into the start of early polling.

NTEC warned it now seemed “highly likely” that counting on election night would be a “slow process”.

Prof Mickel said the early postal voter turnout in the NT would build on trends set in the Queensland council elections (55 per cent) and the federal Eden-Monaro by-election (59 per cent).

He said COVID-19 would make voting early more popular than it already was and this would have a “huge” impact on the way politicians campaigned, and also on how quickly votes would be counted.

Prof Mickel said electoral commissions, like NTEC, should be allowed to count prepoll votes a few hours before polls close on election day proper by locking scrutineers, with no access to communication devices, in a secret spot where prepoll and postal votes would be counted a few hours before official close of polls and not made public until that time.

This is a system already in place in New Zealand.

The NTEC said it was highly supportive of this idea and had pushed for it most recently in 2018 as part of the government’s electoral reforms proposal but was unsuccessful.

A high number of early voters in the NT, Natalie Lernbom and Ashley Tyson get their votes in. Picture Katrina Bridgeford.

“With the popularity of early voting expected to continue to rise in the future the NTEC will continue to recommend a change in the legislation to enable (this),” Commissioner Iain Loganathan said.

As of last night, 13,198 people had voted early across the NT. About 9000 people applied for a postal vote.

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Drysdale voter Natalie Lernbom-Rowe opted to lodge her ballot early in the Darwin CBD out of convenience and convinced her mate and first-time voter Ashley Tyson to do the same.

“I thought I might as well get involved and do it. I don’t want to get fined, I wanted to get it over and done with.”