By MEGAN OGLE
LOCAL media has reported the electronic ballot-scanning pilot launched in five councils during the weekend’s local government election in Queensland has caused concern for potential councillors.
The technology that runs first-past-the-post ballot papers through a scanner, takes a photo, and then recognises the numeral, has caused extensive delays in the Noosa, Mackay, Toowoomba, Livingstone and Gladstone council regions.
At the time of print, 10 of the 18 polling booths had been counted in Noosa leaving councillors in limbo over their fate.
According to local reports, Electoral Commission Queensland (ECQ) assistant commissioner Dermot Tiernan said the delays in Noosa had been caused by sensitivity in the technology.
“What happened on Saturday night is that we started scanning postal votes, and postal votes are always folded up and creased, and we probably set the scanners’ sensitivity a bit too specific, so it was reading some of the creases as marks,“ Mr Tiernan said.
“Once we realised what was going on, we switched to pre-poll votes and the scanning technology worked quite well.“
Mr Tiernan told local media that while the technology had been successfully tested on Noosa ballot papers from the 2012 election, other issues on election night had been the result of dated software.
“The old system was built to run state elections and on Saturday night we had to ask it to run 349 local government elections and 89 little referendum elections on top of that, so the poor thing kept tripping over itself,“ Mr Tiernan said.
Despite the delays, one local government representative said the issue was not with the technology but with the planning processes implemented by ECQ.
Council candidate Brian Stockwell said he believed the delay was due to “resource issues” and referred to the implementation of the new counting system as a “gross mismanagement”.
“Having spent today in the local ECQ office watching the process, it is clear the scanning technology is effective and that the adjudication of informal and non-confirming votes is as quick as conventional counting methods,” he said.
“However, what is also painfully clear is that ECQ may have tested the technology, but has not spent one minute considering workflow, nor done time and motion studies to determine the amount of additional resources required after polling day as a result of centralising the counting process.
“The local office has more people today than yesterday and they are helpful and hardworking, but it is clear you can’t replace 100 booth workers who would have normally conducted the count on polling day with five people and two machines.”
“To suggest the count is going at snails’ pace is an insult to snails.”
Noosa Park Association vice-president Michael Gloster also weighed in on the issue with a short letter to the editor urging ECQ to scrap the new counting method.
“Get off your backsides and count manually,” he wrote.
“You’re making yourself a laughing stock, and we’re as mad as hell.”
