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Casting your ballot in your trackies at your child’s primary school, before grabbing a sausage or a lamington on your way out, makes election day seem a casual affair. However, the levels of security and scrutiny applied to our votes make it anything but.

It’s a major operation, with more than 100,000 people called in to work for the Australian Electoral Commission on polling day.

What happens to those green and white pieces of paper once you pop them in their respective cardboard boxes? And who does all the vote counting?

Credit: Monique Westermann/Getty Images

Manually counting something as significant as Australia’s election result might seem vintage. But it’s done by hand because it’s so important, and the count needs to be exactly right. Australian National University politics lecturer Jill Sheppard says the Australian Electoral Commission, the agency responsible for conducting the election, is yet to be convinced there’s a better way, “and I think they’re right”.

At 6pm on election night, the doors at polling booths will be locked, and the ballots emptied from their boxes on to a large table.

First, the electoral officials will count how many ballots were cast. This is to match the number of ballots cast with the number issued on the day, says University of Sydney politics lecturer Stewart Jackson.

Then they’ll start counting House of Representatives ballots “because that one’s at least vaguely easy to count”. Lower house ballots list the candidates in a seat. Voters must number all the boxes in order of their preference (thus, preferential voting).

“The AEC treats ballot papers like gold.”

The votes are sorted into piles according to their first preferences then counted. Then comes the two-candidate preferred count, which gives an early indication of who is most likely to win the seat by showing how preferences are likely to flow to the two candidates the AEC has identified as the most likely contenders.

The full count, which happens later, is a systematic process that starts with the candidate with the least first preference votes being eliminated from the race and their voting papers redistributed according to who was listed second on each ballot. This process of eliminating the least popular candidates and redistributing the preferences of those who voted for them continues until a clear winner and runner-up is identified.

Meanwhile, the Senate ballots are sorted only by the first preferences indicated above the line. (More on that later.) Voting above the line means numbering political parties from one to six in order of preference.

Counting House of Representatives ballots in 2019 at Old Parliament House, in Canberra.Credit: Courtesy the AEC

The preliminary counting to ascertain a clear winner and runner-up is what’s called the indicative count. It’s what is provided to parties, media and electoral analysts on the night to form a good idea about who will form government. When the victory speeches are made on the night, or a candidate concedes defeat, this is what it’s based on. Officials never formally declare a result on election night. This is done in the days and weeks after, when all the postal, pre-poll votes and absentee votes (those deposited outside a voter’s electorate) are accounted for.

On election night, vote counting stops at midnight, local time, by which time the commission expects that all votes cast on the day will have been counted – as will most votes cast in previous days of polling. The only pre-poll votes not counted on the night are the ones that have to travel across the country to their home electorate – if someone casts a pre-poll vote in an electorate they don’t live in, this must travel to the electorate it belongs to in order to be counted. Most of this travel happens on the Sunday.

Counting of postal votes will begin on Sunday afternoon – earlier than previous elections, when it kicked off on the Tuesday. But with 2.7 million postal votes to count, up from 1.5 million in 2019, the commission says if the numbers are close, there might not be an indicative result on election night. (There are 17 million people enrolled to vote.)

Sheppard often wonders how difficult it would be to rig an Australian election. “It’s just impossible,” she says. “The AEC treats ballot papers like gold.” As officials count the ballot, there are others employed by the commission on the day to make sure everything is being done correctly.

Then there are the scrutineers, volunteers attending on behalf of candidates to oversee the process. Sheppard says the scrutineers can get “pretty bolshie” if there’s a close count.

“If you number your ballot one to six, but your four looks a bit like a five, the scrutineer asks for the counter to stop, and they discuss whether it should be allowed or not,” she says.

Voting in Antarctica, 2019.Credit: Courtesy of AEC

The electoral officer in charge of the polling station then drives the ballots to a centralised warehouse – where the votes are all counted again, by hand. “You do something important, you do it twice,” says the AEC’s media director Evan Ekin-Smyth.

On the Monday following the election, the count will be repeated at the centralised facility, which is shared by multiple electorates. For example, in Queanbeyan the warehouse team will be doing the counting operation for the three ACT divisions as well as Eden-Monaro.

This is also where the postal votes are counted, which the AEC must wait to arrive for up to 13 days after the election.

The first preferences for the Senate ballot are also counted again, before they are repackaged and sent to a (cue ominous music) Central Senate Scrutiny site in each state and territory for ... more counting.

Some votes can’t be counted. These are called informal votes, and can include ballots that are blank or unmarked, contain ticks or crosses instead of numbers, have something on them that identifies the voter, or simply don’t have the required number of boxes unmarked.

“There was a famous incident in a general election where someone had crossed out names of candidates. They’d numbered the boxes correctly but inserted the names of supercar drivers,” says politics lecturer Stewart Jackson.

We said before only the first preferences for the Senate ballots were tallied in the indicative count. The rest of them are scanned into computers. Yes, computers pick up the counting at this point.

This is because of a rule change in 2016 that gave voters the option of numbering their preferences both above the line or below the line.

“We couldn’t do it any other way in the timeframe allowed,” says Ekin-Smyth. “Full, manual Senate counts, we just can’t do them any more; it would take six months.”

Still, what the computer sees and what the operator sees have to align. If they don’t, there’s another manual check. Once all the ballots are keyed in, “we then effectively push a button, which distributes all the preferences,” says Ekin-Smyth.

When a result is finally declared, the commission returns official documents called writs to the Governor-General and governors of each state, no more than 100 days after they were issued. The issuing of these important bits of paper enable an election to be held, and contain the legal authority to declare a result.

Once an election result is declared, ballots are stored at AEC warehouses around the country, for the life of the Parliament for which the election was conducted. This is in case someone wants to challenge the result. “Say it’s won by six votes,” Stewart Jackson says. “People have 40 days to lodge a petition to the Court of Disputed Returns, which is the High Court.”

A candidate, or anyone who is eligible to vote, can challenge the result, which might lead to a full recount or an examination of individual ballot papers.

If you'd like some expert background on an issue or a news event, drop us a line at explainers@smh.com.au or explainers@theage.com.au. Read more explainers here.