What cheeses me off

The Australian Electoral Commission. Especially the South Australian Division. They have one job to do and get four years notice to do this. Hold State Elections and count the votes. Simples.

We had an election in SA on 21 March. A few glitches, like the electoral roll not being accessible, and so on. But after the election it emerged that many people working on the day had not been paid, 3 weeks later.

We live in Barunga electorate. It's pretty much Yorke Peninsula. We were the last electorate to be declared after a recount. One Nation was declared winner after 10 days. Ok. By 68 votes. Her members were very active in the community pre election. One town went full blown orange. So, we are done right? Nope. Today a box of uncounted votes for this electorate were found. 84 unopened ballot papers. So another recount. There is now going to be an external inquiry into the Electoral Commission.
I read about this on news.com.au. ;)
 
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The electoral commission then stopped using it in the following 2023 State election.

A huge backwards step imo. There were issues in a couple of regional places; but it worked perfectly in the local elections prior and worked fine in my electorate at the state election. Online is great for those who work or are travelling, instant confirmation that ballot papers have been filled in correctly (especially useful for the giant upper house ballot where too many don't know how to correctly fill it in) and result could be known within a minute of the polls closing.

Common sense would have been to fix the issues in those couple of electorates rather than revert to slow, environmentally unfriendly paper method. Your can audit electronic ballots just like you cant paper ones; we audit banks and asx etc purely on electronic records.

The fact that so many vote early these days shows few care to participate in the ancient ritual of wasting hours of their weekend queuing for something that could be done in 2 minutes less online. And fact that someone can just lose or forget whole box or two of ballots, well that wouldn't happen online.
 

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