Election Results Delay

The results for 25 local authorities and district health boards may not be known until next week, meaning a delay of over a foirtnight.

Some people have pointed to the fact that the Australian election does not yet have final results either, to suggest the NZ problem is not large.

This is misleading for two reasons:

1) NZ was postal ballots with all votes received by midday 9 October, and the law allowed counting as you go of ballots received previously. In theory all that had to happen on the 9th was to count the 5% of papers received that morning. Australia has to wait for late, absentee and postal ballots to come in, and could only start counting at 7 pm on the 9th.

2) I’ve yet to see a single full STV result, showing preferences. In Australia one can see above the line counts such as Victoria, clearly indicating that it is Labor giving preferences to Family First, which shut the Greens out and helps cement a centre right majority in the Senate.

I hope there are performance contracts with the two election processing companies, and if not, why not?