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. My Discord has also 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.
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.