With the day of deciding now upon us, everyone is on the edge of their seats to find the outcome of Voice to Parliament referendum. But when can we expect to have a referendum result?
Should we expect to have the result of the referendum to be a same day delivery, or will snail-mail draw out the count for as long as two weeks like some experts suggest?
Short answer: nobody knows exactly. Soz.
It could take a few hours if there’s a clear and easy winner like we saw in the 2022 Federal Election. Or it could be a nail-biter and take two whole-ass weeks.
We haven’t held a referendum in Australia since 1999, and the closest thing we’ve had to one since then was the 2017 Same-Sex Marriage plebiscite which took just over a week to count.
But that’s because it was a postal-survey and those are counted differently to elections and referendums. So we really have no exact frame of reference!
This is why there’s a massive time frame, spanning from a few hours to 14 days. So anything between three and 336 hours? Cool.
Now I don’t know about you, but if a cafe I was at told me the waiting time for food scaled by a magnitude of a hundred, I’d wanna speak to the manager to find out WTF’s goin’ on.
So we went to the manager equivalent of Aussie elections, the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC), and got the answers.
“Results will be broken down nationally, at state / territory level, divisional level and polling place level – just like at a federal election,” a spokesperson for the AEC said when asked how counting the referendum will be different to counting a standard election.
This is due to the fact a referendum can only pass with a double majority – which means a majority of the states need to vote in favour, as well as a majority of Australia’s entire voting population.
The spokesperson also clarified why the act of counting itself is different to elections, saying that, “for a referendum we are counting ‘yes’ and ‘no’ votes as opposed to preferences in an election.”
This means there’s lots more votes that need to be counted for a call to be made than just the ones in marginal seats.
When will we know the referendum result?
Some estimates say that due to how much easier this will be to count, a substantial amount of votes will be counted in the first few hours, which could be enough to declare a result before voting has even closed in Western Australia.
When we asked the AEC how long will it take to have a result, here’s what they had to say:
“Given the count is simpler at a referendum due to not having to count preferences, there is a possibility that we could have an unofficial indicative result on the night, depending on how close the count is. However, if the count is close, we may not have a clear result.”
The AEC also noted that cannot declare a result on the night because they have to be mathematically certain, which is why the media make the announcements.
“Whether or not those public predictions by others are made on the night depends entirely on how close the result will be.”
It’s important to remember that some outlets call elections early than others. The media is super competitive to be the first to make the announcement. It’s kind of a whole dick envy macho “we called it first” type of toxicity.
ABC will typically call it last, because Aunty don’t play petty.
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