Legislative Assembly: voting and counting

An Initial Count is conducted for each venue/vote type. Ballot papers are examined for formality and sorted to the first preference for each candidate or to the Informals/Queries pile – that is, ballot papers where there is no first preference recorded or that cannot be sorted to a candidate as they appear to be informal.

Formal ballot papers incorrectly sorted to the Informals/Queries pile will be sorted to the correct pile when the Informals/Queries pile is reviewed by election official in charge during the Initial Count, or during the Check Count.

The Initial Count is an indicative count only.

Before election day, the Electoral Commissioner selects two candidates in each electoral district who are considered most likely to be the two remaining candidates after the Distribution of Preferences for that district. These are known as the TCP candidates.

The TCP count is conducted immediately after the Initial Count by distributing each of the non-TCP candidates’ ballot papers to the TCP candidate with the next highest preference on each ballot paper. When a ballot paper does not contain a valid preference for either of the TCP candidates, the ballot paper is considered exhausted for the purpose of this count.

The TCP Count is not the official distribution of preferences. It provides an indication of the likely election outcome only.

The following table illustrates various scenarios that may apply to a district’s TCP results:

The TCP count is conducted as:

• one count per voting centre

• one count per early voting centre

• one count for all declared facilities together

• one count for each of the three postal progressive counts.

TCP counts will not be conducted during the Initial Count of declaration vote ballot papers – that is, Absent, Enrolment and Name Already Marked as Voted (NAMAV) vote types. However, as the Check Count is completed for a venue/vote type (see below), TCP results will be available for all vote types.

The Check Count consists of a combination of a manual process (batching) and a data entry process:

• Batching: sorting the ballot papers for each candidate into single preference (that is, a single ’1’, a single ‘tick’, or a single ‘cross’ and no other preferences) and multi preference. The informal ballot papers are sorted into Blanks and Non-Blanks.

• Registration: entering the check count results into the computer count system.

• Data entry: entering all preferences on all multi preference ballot papers into the computer count system. The single preference ballot papers for each candidate and the blanks are registered as a bulk figure (the step above) and do not undergo data entry.

The Check Count is the official count that is used in the Distribution of Preferences within the computer count system to determine the elected candidate(s).

The Distribution of Preferences to determine the elected candidate is conducted by the Election Manager for the electoral district after the Check Count is completed. The Distribution of Preferences is conducted within the computer count system in an automated manner, using all the preferences and single preference totals entered during the Check Count.

* Information about the location of postal and declaration vote counts will be published on the NSW Electoral Commission website.

The Distribution of Preferences will be conducted by the Election Manager following the completion of counting in Week 3. The exact date and time will be determined closer to the date and will be published on the NSW Electoral Commission website.

The distribution of preferences is in accordance with the optional preferential system described in the Seventh Schedule to the Constitution Act.

To be elected in the optional preferential system, a candidate has to receive 50% + 1 of the formal votes in the count. This is called an ‘absolute majority’.

If there are 8,756 formal first preference votes in an election the absolute majority is calculated as: 8,756 ÷ 2 = 4,378 + 1 = 4,379.

If a candidate has an absolute majority, that candidate is elected.

If no candidate is elected, the candidate with the least number of votes is ‘excluded’, which means the excluded candidate’s votes are re-sorted to the other candidates remaining in the count according to the second preference shown on each ballot paper.

However, if any of those ballot papers do not have a second preference, or have two or more second preferences on them, those ballot papers are known as ‘exhausted’ ballot papers and are removed from the count. They are then only used to balance the number of votes at the end of each exclusion, to the number of first preference votes.

The absolute majority is recalculated after every candidate is excluded. The absolute majority reduces after each exclusion due to the exhausted ballot papers not continuing in the count.

The process of exclusions continues until a candidate is elected. The ballot papers of excluded candidates are re-sorted to the second, third, fourth etc. preferences as applicable, until such time as a candidate has an absolute majority of the votes remaining in the count and that candidate is elected.

For statistical purposes, the distribution of preferences will be conducted until only two candidates remain in the count.

The process is explained in the following example: