THE Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) could be in a position to announce a provisional result in the electorate of Monash, four days after the election.
Speaking on ABC Gippsland Radio this morning, AEC senior media officer Alex Morris said counting was continuing in the seat of Monash today, attempting to identify the right ‘Two Candidate Preferred’ combination, out of the Liberals’ Mary Aldred, Labor’s Tully Fletcher and independent Deb Leonard before producing a provisional result in the seat, potentially as early at Wednesday, May 7.
Mr Morris was asked “What’s happening in the seat of Monash right now?”
“It is a complicated one. So, in ordinary seats, we do what is called a two-candidate preferred count. This is not a final call of the seat. In fact, we haven't made a final declaration on who's won in any seat in the country yet.
“But the two-candidate preferred count can help election analysts, like Antony Green to make predictions about the likely winner of a seat, and that, of course, can feed into things like concession speeches and new governments being sworn in etc.
“In Monash, however, we have a situation where the leading candidate is quite clear, but it is not clear who the second candidate is likely to be.”
Mr Morris said that if it was a first-past-the-post result it would be easy. Mary Aldred has the most first preference votes, but in a preferential system, all votes need to be counted until someone gets to the magic 50 per cent of the votes and preferences, plus one.
“We have a preferential voting system and it's more complicated than that. So, we have one candidate who is leading, and we have essentially what appears to be a race between the next two candidates to see, essentially, which one to include in the two-candidate preferred count.
“So, what we're doing is what we call a three-candidate preferred count in that seat where we are making three piles of ballot papers according to who has been preferenced higher.
“That process began yesterday and it's continuing today. Once that count is complete and when we have enough information to tell us who to include in that two-candidate preferred count, we’ll reset the two-candidate preferred count and wrap it up and produce some results that analysts can use to make predictions.”
Right now, Mary Aldred for the Liberal Party is sitting at number one for Monash. The race for second is between Tully Fletcher for the Labor Party and Deb Leonard.
The AEC makes a decision about which polling booths in Monash will give them the best indication of how preferences are flowing, count enough of those to establish the pattern and then nominate which one of Tully Fletcher or Deb Leonard should go forward for the provisional count.
Ultimately though, according to Mr Morris, the AEC will count all the votes and distribute all of the preferences until they get a final result.
That, he said, could take until the end of the week, or well into next week while they wait for the last of the postal votes to arrive.
“At the end of the day we are talking about how to do an indicative count. The AEC is always going to do a full preferential count, which can only start after we've received every postal vote,” said Mr Morris.
“It is not official results. The official results will take some time. The AEC won't be in a position to make declarations of the results, even the most safe seats in the country, probably until the very end of this week, and more likely early next week.”
However, Mr Morris said he couldn’t recall a time when the type of three-candidate preferred count that was being conducted in Monash had produced a result that turned out to be different from the final result.
“We're running a few of them across the country, and we're looking at getting them up on the website today so that people can have a look, and analysts can have a closer look as well.”
Mr Morris said there were as many as a dozen such counts going on across Australia at the moment to determine provisional results in the seats before going to a full count.
Of course, these sorts of arrangements would be more pressing if the Labor Party had not won a clear majority of 91 seats (provisional) in a parliament of 151
Speaking about the situation in Monash, leading candidate Mary Aldred said she was respecting the process.
“We’re in a good position but the AEC has an important job to do and I want to respect the process that needs to be completed.
First preference voting in Monash
* ROBINSON, Kuljeet Kaur 7138 votes 7.83%
* FLETCHER, Tully 18,506 votes 20.29%
* BROADBENT, Russell 9340 votes, 10.24%
* ALDRED, Mary 29,492 votes, 32.34%
* LEONARD, Deb 15,812 votes, 17.34%
* DETHLEFS, Geoff 1581 votes, 1.73%
* O'REILLY, David 3016 votes, 3.31%
* STEELE, Terence 4090 votes, 4.49%
* WEHBE, Alex 2213 votes, 2.43%
* Formal 91,188 votes, 94.51%
* Informal 5293 votes, 5.49%
* Total votes 96,481.
