I had the opportunity today to visit the Bradfield recount, thanks to being appointed as a scrutineer. I did not attempt to challenge any ballots, but this gave me the best way to see how the process works. I was thinking of doing a podcast, and I may do that at some point if I get to interview some of the scrutineers, but for now I thought I’d summarise what I found in a blog post.
Firstly I should say that the process was careful and meticulous, with AEC staff and scrutineers all playing their role carefully and taking everything seriously. I do think if more people could see the process it would increase faith in democratic processes. While most of the time we just see the numbers slowly and occasionally changing, a lot of work goes on behind the scenes.
So the Bradfield recount is being held in a warehouse in Asquith that appears to have been used for a number of northern Sydney electorates, but today only Bradfield was being counted. A space is set aside as a break room for scrutineers, with large teams for the teal and the Liberal candidate. Each candidate had at least enough scrutineers to have one on every person doing counting.
The regular counting space is divided into a series of bays. Each bay is dealing with one polling place at a time. It appears that a bay deals with a polling place until it finishes, then moves on to another. Some are bigger than others, to deal with booths of different sizes.
The first part of the process is to conduct a fresh first-preference count. Ballot papers are already bundled up in first preference order, so the votes previously assigned to each candidate are dealt with one at a time. For some of the bigger bays, there might be tables just dealing with Boele votes or Kapterian votes, and another table dealing with the other candidates.
Ballot papers are usually bundled up in bundles of 50 votes, wrapped in a rubber band, to simplify counting. Each counter takes one bundle at a time and removes the rubber band, and then carefully checks each ballot to ensure it is formal and that the first preference is correct. It is then laid on a pile facing the scrutineers, who can observe it. This process is happening more slowly and carefully than you would expect for an election night count.
Once each bundle is fully checked, the rubber band is put back on, and they keep going until they’ve checked all the votes for that candidate. Once this is done, the counter will take each bundle and hand-count to verify each bundle of 50 is a bundle of 50, and then the other counter sharing that table will swap bundles and do the same check. In theory they could find a mis-counted bundle of 49 or 51 but I did not see this happen.
During this process, scrutineers are free to challenge a ballot. If so, the ballot is put in a box to be referred to the Divisional Returning Officer (DRO) for review. This happened with a decent number of votes – a few dozen for a normal booth size – but not excessively. I should also say that each candidate appeared to be entitled to have one scrutineer per counter. So at a table with two counters, there would be two Boele scrutineers and two Kapterian scrutineers.
Once the primary votes have all been checked, the informal pile is also checked. And then the box of challenged ballots is reviewed by the DRO.
After the DRO review each booth will then re-do the distribution of preferences (DoP), step by step. Presumably the final figures from this distribution is then updated as a fresh 2CP figure, and can change the margin. It seemed like smaller numbers of votes were also challenged through the steps of the DoP.
The DRO reviews were usually observed by the most senior and experienced scrutineers. The DRO considers each ballot carefully, and makes a ruling about the position of the ballot (who gets the first preference or informal), and stamps the back and fills out a little form explaining their decision. A scrutineer at this point can refer a ballot to the Australian Electoral Officer (AEO) for a final decision.
The AEO is the chief AEC staff member for the state, and is effectively the final arbiter for the recount process.
Every now and then, the AEO has a session with one scrutineer representing each candidate. The AEO considers each ballot referred up for adjudication one by one. The AEO has a magnifying glass and will carefully consider each ballot in line with the AEC’s formality principles.
I found that both the DRO and AEO are careful and cautious, but also very clear on their priorities. The formality principles require them to construe the ballot paper as a whole, and err in favour of the franchise. This means that sometimes when a number is not entirely clear, but context clues make it clear that, for example, it would make sense for that to be a 4 rather than a 7, then they may interpret it that way, but it needs to be clear enough to be sure which number is the 4 and which is the 7. I found officials who apply rules that can be very strict, but while giving a ballot the best chance of being counted.
I found that the scrutineers mostly left it to the DRO and AEO at this stage to make their decisions without much argument, although occasionally they’d politely make a case for a particular figure representing a particular number. There definitely wasn’t arguments or shouting. You wouldn’t know these people are in a fierce recount coming down to a handful of votes.
The vast majority of ballot papers are clearly written and have a clear sequence of 8 numbers, and are dealt with swiftly. But watching these contested ballots, it was frustrating to see votes that clearly attempted to express a preference ending up informal. In some cases it seemed like a voter made a mistake by losing count of where they were up to – a ballot might have unique numbers 1-5 and 7, but two sixes instead of a 6 and an 8.
In plenty of other cases, the culprit was bad handwriting, making it hard to tell which number was which. The AEC officials did their best to fairly determine the correct answer, including for some ballots that I doubted would be admitted to the count, but ultimately sometimes it’s too hard. Voters, try your best to write the numbers clearly and distinctly!
But in a lot of cases where votes were made informal, it was perfectly clear who they preferred between Boele and Kapterian – the confusion was irrelevant to the ultimate outcome of the race. Even if we don’t go to full OPV, I think we need to find a way to ensure these votes can be admitted to the count.
While we were watching votes being admitted or rejected, it was not possible to know if the margin was changing, because we didn’t know the previous status of a ballot paper. But the data suggests very few votes are changing from one category to another.
Following my return from the count, I’ve downloaded more media feed data to see how the lead has changed:
Monday and Tuesday were good days for Kapterian, extending her lead from 8 votes to 14. But today has been a good day for Boele, reining in Kapterian’s lead from 14 votes to just 5. This race remains extremely close.
The AEC appears to be making good progress, but there is still a lot of booths yet to be recounted. According to the AEC’s website, 19 out of 65 booths have updated their first preferences this week, and 19 booths (seemingly the same ones) have also updated their two-candidate-preferred count. This suggests that we are on track for the recount to finish late next week.