April 1, 2016
by Anne Miller
It’s April Fool’s Day but the biggest joke in the South Burnett today is the election results.
Or rather, the lack of them.
It is now two weeks after the Council poll and we still don’t have a Mayor.
And the election figures have not been changed on the Electoral Commission of Queensland’s website for days.
People are starting to ask what’s going on … and we agree.
What IS going on? The South Burnett is a small shire …
The delay is creating rumours. It takes time to rub out pencil marks and put numbers in different boxes!
This is ridiculous, of course, because there are scrutineers keeping a close eye on things to make sure no hanky panky occurs. But the longer the delay goes on, the more we start to look like a Third World country.
What is the problem?
Is the Electoral Commission of Queensland so badly resourced that there is one man and a dog doing the counting?
And who is updating the website?
On the night of the poll it blocked people who were visiting the site too frequently … people such as candidates and journalists.
This was fixed by the next day, but that hasn’t been the end of the odd happenings.
southburnett.com.au has been visiting the site frequently. We have seen booth numbers go up and then down; and candidate figures also change up and down (particularly in Toowoomba).
We assume that this has something to do with recounting, but it is not filling us with confidence about the electoral process.
No one that I have spoken to can remember another election count having so many hiccups – local, State or Federal.
And it’s not as if the Council election date was sprung on the ECQ.
They have known for four years that the poll would be held on March 19, 2016, and should have had plenty of time to get their computer systems and staff protocols working properly.
I heard an ECQ official explain (about 10 days ago now) that the count was taking so long because there were so many Councils …
That’s no excuse. Before the Labor Party forced amalgamations on local councils, Queensland had many, many more.
And we used to get the results on the Saturday night of the poll.
Smells a rat, or maybe a dead fish, cos something must be going on. Transparency ? I also agree about using pencils to vote with, that is only asking for trouble.