The Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) has announced that at the end of last week (31 May) it had officially declared 34 seats of the House of Representative’s 151 electorates and expected to decide a further 12 yesterday (Monday, 3 June).
In a statement, the AEC said last Friday marked the final day it legally had to wait for postal votes to be received and added into counting.
“In each Federal Election there are a number of House of Representatives seats (29 at the 2016 Federal Election) where a full distribution of preferences must be undertaken for the AEC to determine the final margin between the two leading candidates,” the Commission said.
“A full distribution of preferences can occur only once the deadline for the receipt of postal votes has passed.”
It said a full distribution of preferences involved a further count of all formal votes cast in the seats which would take a number of days.
As a result, some seat declarations would take longer than others.
“The closest remaining seat in the 2019 Federal Election is the Division of Macquarie, NSW,” the AEC said.
“The process of scanning Senate ballot papers, then manually re-entering and verifying more than 100 million preferences, continues.”
