FEAR & GREED | Business NewsWelcome to Ask Fear and Greed, where we answer questions about business, investing, economics, politics and more. I'm Michael Thompson and hello.
Sean Al Michael soho on.
Today's question falls very much into the latter category of politics and it feels very timely because we are what forty eight hours away from polling day and the question is how other votes counted? So if we assume that everyone's voted, how then are they counted? How do we decide the next prime minister?
Wow? We watch TV and we see whaten Anthony Green? And what's the worst cithologist. I'm trying to think of.
The yes, yes, someone who does election guru.
I can't think of it. Basically, all votes are counted near the polling station and the idea is that they're counted on the night of the election. Now, according to the Australian Electoral Commission, the House of Representative votes are counted first and it includes a preference count followed by two candidate preferred counts. So basically they put all the votes into piles. They work out in most electorates there's going to be two that are leading the way and what they do is then go to the preferences for the others. Now, in some electrics it's too close to the three cornered race or three legged stool, whatever it is, they actually have the three people running, and that is a lot trickier and we won't get a result then. But generally the AEC starts counting at six pm. By seven point thirty eight o'clock, some of the returns start coming in. Now as the returns come in, all those folk who are experts at this on the TV stations, they start predicting based on what happened three years ago and what happened six years ago about how those sorts of where the account will end up.
And it's all made more complicated by preferential voting, right, I mean, it could be a lot simpler if it was just you just had to put a one next to an individual candidate. But by having to number every box on the Lower House voting slip, it does mean then that the counting is a slightly slower process. You would imagine where they do need to go and count the first preferences and then knock out kind of the lower the people who got the fewest votes and then kind of reallocate them based on where the second preference for each person's vote went, and then so on and so forth.
Yeah, what's interesting this year is that pre pole counts are going to be really large. I mean I think it was twenty two million or so, sorry, not twenty two percent. About four million people have actually pre polled, and generally prepole counting starts being displayed about nine point thirty PM Eastern State's time, and that goes through quite late in the night. By nine point thirty, you would think we will have a winner or a potential winner. If we don't and the pre polls counting kind of kicks in, that will certainly give us a fair indication of where we're going to land. Now, whether or not there's an overall result on an election night, generally there is. The AEC is extremely good at I think it's every ninety seconds or something. They throw out information for the TV stations to pick up and it's their official numbers. But sometimes there was an election a few years ago, we it really took quite some time, but mostly in Australia, by the time you go to bed, you know, is it.
That the postal votes separate to the pre poll votes where you can line up at a polling station and vote in advance the postal votes, which are all submitted via mail in the weeks leading up to it. They were always I might be wrong with this, but counted last.
Yes, I think that is true.
Yes, And that's why often there was a trend observed where the postal votes often went quite well for the Conservative Party. And that might be a trend that is no longer relevant now, but often because it was perhaps older voters which are rural voters yep, indeed, that are not able to get to a polling place on voting day, so they would do a postal vote instead. And so that's why there's kind of you'll hear the commentary on election night and they're talking about the fact, oh, yes, the postal votes are still to come, which can benefit often the conservative candidate elect.
They've got up to thirteen days to be counted, so if a postal vote comes in thirteen days later, it will still be counted. So often you don't get the final numbers till a month after the election.
It can be a very very long pro And remember the last time we had minority government when it was the labor labor minority and in the end, they needed the support of robo shot and Tony Windsor and Andrew Wilkie in order to get to get across the line. And that wasn't decided anywhere near voting day and not that was days of negotiations afterwards. So it can be quite a protracted process.
The other cool thing is that every ballot paper is actually counted twice to make sure they get it right. That's a good point. Yeah, and so most electorates you find the winner, but some of those other ones to very close that second count really matters.
We do have an awesome system, really.
We do. When you think about voting is unreal.
When you think about it, the fact that your vote will count. It is not as though it just gets discarded because he voted for someone who didn't get across the line. Your vote actually does count, and you know that if you vote, your voter is going to be counted, and which is something that can't necessarily be said in other countries around the world.
Yeah. Absolutely, anyway, that's.
A very positive way to finish. I think that's it. I think we've answered the question adequately there.
Sean, and I think so.
Thank you very much.
Thanks Michael.
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