Today is International Day of #Democracy!
We’re celebrating the people behind the operation in 2022 - the 105,000 temporary employees & our permanent AEC team.
Together, we held a national election with a variety of voting options including 500+ early voting centres, 7,000+ polling places as well as postal voting, telephone voting & remote voting.
The impact of the pandemic also added complexity to conducting what is already Australia’s largest peacetime logistical exercise, with 63,000L of hand sanitiser & 34,000 bottles of surface cleaner to ensure voters & staff we’re safe & could have confidence voting in person.
We’re dedicated to the integrity of the vote, with an election that was undertaken with secure counting & trusted results. This election could only happen because of the many Australians that put their hands up to help deliver it.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
Good morning Australia. We'll be determining final Senate results for the ACT and NT today. But how does this actually work? Read on...
The Senate count is one of the most complex upper house counts in the world - it's so complex that we needed to write a program to distribute your preferences, as doing it by hand would mean we couldn't provide elected Senators in time to take their seat.
When you filled out your Senate ballot, you numbered a lot of boxes. We counted the number 1s by hand & then captured the numbers you wrote down into our Senate preferencing program, and have been manually verifying them.
“We simply cannot count postal votes on election night - we’re already at the limits of our staffing capacity, and work health and safety responsibilities, with the count of election day and pre-poll votes”
- Electoral Commissioner, Tom Rogers.
“With 105,000 staff, we’re temporarily one of the nation’s largest employers, which is an undoubted resourcing challenge during COVID-19.”
Postal vote counts have been brought forward in the counting timetable from 2019 when it commenced on the Tuesday after election day.
We’ve had a lot of questions about accessibility for flood-affected voters in Lismore and the Northern Rivers. These are fair questions and we take accessibility for all voters seriously. 🧵 below for our answers.
First, we’re on the ground. AEC staff, including our senior managers, have visited the area and divisional teams are working locally to provide voting services to the community.
For enrolment (which has now closed) we contacted flood-affected voters directly to discuss their options. These options included updating enrolment details to add a temporary or permanent address for those who needed to relocate.