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.