The process of vote-counting for the Victorian council elections started last Saturday, and while a lot of votes have been counted, absolutely none of them have been officially published for the public on the VEC’s website.
The process commenced last Saturday, and in the early days of the week some results have started to leak out. The Age started a live blog yesterday with a variety of results. 6 News’ Local Elections website has also been publishing results, and my Discord has been very active with results being posted and discussed. But all the results are patchy, only covering some wards of a council, and don’t allow for a clear picture to emerge.
The reason why these results are patchy is because the VEC are not giving any information directly to the media or the public, either via their website or directly to journalists. They are only publishing provisional results as reports sent to candidate scrutineers, and in some cases those scrutineers are choosing to share them.
(Results are provisional because votes have been split into “Group A” and “Group B”, depending on whether the vote arrived by last Friday – Group A is being counted now, Group B will need to wait until next week, after the deadline for the return of votes on Friday).
This is on top of the VEC’s practice of publishing data on the number of votes returned per day by printing the data and sticking it up on the door of the election centre!
This is the year 2024, and this is a public election. Voting data should be simply published when it is available, whether it is provisional results or data on turnout.
This practice wouldn’t be acceptable for state or federal elections. In New South Wales and Queensland, most votes are counted and reported on the first night of counting. Postal votes obviously change the procedure, but I don’t see why provisional reports can’t just be published on the website.
This is yet another example of Victoria neglecting democratic procedures at a state and local level – single-member wards for councils, postal voting with only a single booth for each council, resulting in mammoth lines. At a state level it is the only state still using group voting tickets, although there may be movement on that front. And when it comes to providing public data the VEC does poorly compared to other commissions like the NSWEC or the AEC.
There is an urgent need to review Victoria’s local government elections after this election concludes. Victorians should be demanding better.
In the meantime, pay attention to the Age (or sign up for my Patreon to join the Discord conversation), and once the final results are in I’ll do some more complete analysis.
UPDATE: I sought comment from the VEC this morning, and they replied after I posted. They explained that the issue came about because of a change in postal vote counting procedure in 2016, and that their website results system has not been updated for the new procedure. The spokesperson said “The reason we don’t publish this on our website is that our election management system and our website are not configured to provide real-time results publication for local councils (unlike for state elections).”
The VEC also made it clear that they understand the problem and are working to fix it in the future:
“We appreciate that this creates a lack of information for the public and other interested stakeholders and we acknowledge that it is not meeting community expectations. It is something that we are actively addressing as part of our future development work to ensure that we can provide the same level of results information for both state and local council elections. For now, election managers are posting daily results information in the windows of their election offices during the counting period. This is not an ideal workaround, though it is a temporary solution to ensure people in the local community can access the information that’s available to scrutineers. We appreciate your feedback and rest assured we are as keen as you are to address this in future.”
As a proud Victorian, I 100% agree with all of that Ben. It’s like the VEC are still running elections in 1987.
Even basics like how the results actually do get presented on their website (eg. At state elections) is borderline unreadable. Huge fonts and having to scroll off-screen to see all the candidates’ results but then losing the headings so you don’t even know which one you’re looking at! It makes no sense that in the 2020s they’re unable to improve their digital experience, or in some cases even move from paper to digital!
Don’t get me started on how undemocratic the Melbourne City Council election is either… But I will admit I don’t have too much of an issue with single-member wards. Interestingly they don’t seem to have been resulting in the lopsided councils we expected them to, so far, and I think it’s because independents do so well at a council level and single-member wards do let an independent have a hyper-local focus.
Completely agree, Ben. I live in a small rural/regional local government area that went from 4 single-member wards and one multimember ward (3 members) to 8 single-member wards. In the past two elections, two of the single wards went uncontested. This election 5 wards went uncontested! My submission to VEC pointed out the folly of single-member wards and the likelihood of uncontested elections. Alas, I was ignored. Most submissions supported single-member wards because there would, supposedly, be better local representation.
Good points. Thanks.
The true test will be how it affects council decision making and representation. It can promote candidates whose first loyalty is to their small ward vs needing to make decisions with the big picture in mind. As well, if voters only have 1 councillor to contact in the first instance, they may get a raw deal if ( by chance!) “their” cr is a dud or, committed but just learning politics. The multi member ward system we have had until recently in metro Melb has been more successful at overcoming these issues. There is also a uni research project planned to address the potential impact of enforced single member wards on the relative diversity of those elected, with a focus on women.