The Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) says it is “deeply concerned” that a worker took almost 2,000 ballots home from a Hurstville polling booth in the Sydney electorate of Barton.
The AEC said the incident did not impact polling counts in Barton, where Labor candidate Ash Ambihaipahar won with 66.1 percent of the vote in the seat formerly held by Labor’s Linda Burney.
According to the AEC’s investigations, on polling night, all votes were counted in the Hurstville polling place in the presence of candidate-appointed scrutineers, with all results reported to the AEC’s tally room in real time.
As per normal practice in all 7,000 polling places, the ballot papers were packaged in the presence of scrutineers with an AEC transport officer collecting seven ballot paper transport containers (five Senate and two House of Representatives) from the Officer in Charge of the polling place for delivery to a materials return hub. It then goes on to the AEC’s Out-posted Centre (counting centre) to await further processing.
In the days following polling night, the AEC undertakes fresh scrutiny (the mandatory second count of all House of Representatives ballot papers), which begins on Tuesday.
When AEC staff got to the point of conducting fresh scrutiny for the Hurstville polling place, they were initially unable to proceed.
The AEC’s tracking processes for ballot paper transport containers identified that one of the two House of Representatives containers for the Hurstville polling place was not returned to the central counting centre it should have been.
All six other transport containers for the polling place were accounted for.
The AEC says it then exhausted “numerous avenues of inquiry, ascertaining that the authorised transport officer inadvertently maintained possession of the single missing container.”
“It was recovered from the transport officer fully intact, with all uniquely coded security seals unbroken, and without any damage,” the AEC said.
“All ballot papers were still in the recovered ballot paper transport container and were promptly returned to the counting centre and have undergone fresh scrutiny. The fresh scrutiny count matched the initial count and the election in the Division of Barton was unaffected by this incident.”
The AEC says the incident should not have happened and was “deeply concerned” that the processes put in place did not manage to prevent the incident from happening.
“However, the further layers of ballot paper tracking processes in place for many elections did ultimately identify the issue and help rectify the situation,” it said.
“Nonetheless, work is already underway to further investigate this incident to understand what, if any, elements of the return of materials process need to be changed for future elections.”
While the AEC says it experienced a number of challenges communicating with the polling worker who had the ballots, it is not believed the act was deliberate.
