Monday Morning 10 September 2012
It’s a clifhanger! The Australian Election Company are keeping us on tenterhooks waiting for results in this election.
The Mayoral race is still too close to call with Geoff Dingle closing the gap, from 917 behind Bruce Mackenzie on the initial election night count, to 501 after Pre Poll votes were counted. If that trend continues with more than 1571 postal votes to be counted it will make the distribution of Sally Dover’s preferences from her 10,363 votes even more crucial. If people voted 1 Sally Dover those votes will exhaust. If people followed her how to vote card the remainder will go to Bruce Mackenzie, but scrutineers from East Ward booths say that there was substantial leakage to Mr Dingle.
Comments seen on some ballot papers by srutineers cannot be published on this family friendly website, but one enterprising soul had added a box to the Mayoral ballot paper, put a big 1 in it and Stinker Clarke’s name beside it!!
The Councillor’s ballot may not be decided for some days with the main effort being directed to the Mayoral ballot over the next few days which must be declared first. The initial election night spread sheet contained some major errors which were corrected on Sunday afternoon. The addition of an extra column in the East ward spreadsheet containing the Fern Bay Community Hall results, which is actually in Central Ward caused 795 votes to be wrongly allocated to East Ward Candidates. When corrected this completely changed the positions of candidates in contention with the third position on East Ward between John Morello and Colin Howard closing to 155 votes. With Pre Poll and Postal still to be counted and some very messy preferencing to be sorted out, this could still go anywhere, however it would seem that Sally Dover and John Nell will be re-elected for East Ward.
West Ward seems a pretty clear result with incumbent Councillors Peter Kafer and Ken Jordan retaining their positions and Paul Le Mottee picking up the third position, ahead of previous Councillor Glenys Francis’s Husband Peter.
Central Ward is wide open with the Mayoral situation deciding whether Fran Corner (second on Geoff Dingle’s ticket) or Chris Doohan (second on Bruce Mackenzie’s ticket) get the gig along with incumbent Steve Tucker.
The count of the Mayoral voting cannot be finalised until Postal votes are received and validated for counting. The records indicate that 1517 postal votes were sent to voters. The deadline for acceptance of postal votes is 6 pm on Monday 10th September 2012. The next step is to determine if a candidate for Mayor has received more than a fifty per cent majority of the formal ballot papers. If this majority is not achieved, then a distribution of preferences will be conducted.
If a Preference Vote distribution is required, which appears likely at this stage, then the declaration for the Mayor is anticipated to occur either late Wednesday 12 September 2012 or early Thursday 13 September 2012.
Councillors will be allocated Pre Poll, Postal and Declared Institutions after the Mayoral vote has been declared, the preferences will be counted by machine in Newcastle but we may not get a final declaration until the end of the week.
The whole disposition of the new Council will swing on the Mayoral declaration, because this will decide once and for all whether the Candidates that have identified themselves in the Mackenzie ‘Team to Achieve’ faction will have the numbers to dominate PS Council for the next four years.
Watch this space for further information, as it comes to hand.……….
DISCLAIMER
TRRA is apolitical and does not support any individual candidate in this election. We do however reserve the right to hold Past, Present and Future Candidates to account for what they do with our scarce resources.
Some of the views expressed in this post are my personal observations to keep members informed on breaking news, and have not necessarily been endorsed by the TRRA as an organisation.
Dick Appleby: TRRA Webmaster
