AEC voting

The Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) has formally changed telephone voting eligibility to ensure all Australians with COVID-19 will be allowed to have ...

Call 1800 413 960 to cast your vote once you are prepared and have received your telephone voting registration number. The AEC on Thursday said only people who test positive for COVID after 6pm on Tuesday May 17 were eligible to vote over the phone. Stream more world news live & on demand with Flash. 25+ news channels in 1 place.

The Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) is looking to remind those who are in isolation with the virus that registrations for its telephone voting service ...

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The 2022 federal election campaign is over and the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) is set to begin the process of counting millions of votes.

As of Friday, the AEC has received 2.73 million postal vote applications and more than 25,000 people have voted with a mobile voting team. It typically happens in the days and weeks post election." All results are published on its tally room in real time. All of the number "1" (first preference) votes are placed into separate piles for each candidate and counted. Separate piles are created for first preferences allocated to each ungrouped candidate. In fact, it won’t happen the day after either.

Your ballot papers will be counted several times, bagged and tagged, counted again, then kept under lock and key for a few years. Why?

Once an election result is declared, ballots are stored at AEC warehouses around the country, for the life of the Parliament for which the election was conducted. The electoral officer in charge of the polling station then drives the ballots to a centralised warehouse – where the votes are all counted again, by hand. Still, what the computer sees and what the operator sees have to align. When a result is finally declared, the commission returns official documents called writs to the Governor-General and governors of each state, no more than 100 days after they were issued. On the Monday following the election, the count will be repeated at the centralised facility, which is shared by multiple electorates. This is done in the days and weeks after, when all the postal, pre-poll votes and absentee votes (those deposited outside a voter’s electorate) are accounted for. The full count, which happens later, is a systematic process that starts with the candidate with the least first preference votes being eliminated from the race and their voting papers redistributed according to who was listed second on each ballot. Most of this travel happens on the Sunday. (More on that later.) Voting above the line means numbering political parties from one to six in order of preference. Australian National University politics lecturer Jill Sheppard says the Australian Electoral Commission, the agency responsible for conducting the election, is yet to be convinced there’s a better way, “and I think they’re right”. The votes are sorted into piles according to their first preferences then counted. But it’s done by hand because it’s so important, and the count needs to be exactly right.