The New South Wales Liberal leader, Mark Speakman, says he would support the party fighting in court for more time to submit the council candidate nominations it failed to lodge by the deadline.
The party’s state president, Don Harwin, threatened legal action after the electoral commission rejected his second request for a week-long extension to nominate more than 130 of its candidates for the 14 September local government elections.
Speakman on Monday afternoon said the party should pursue “all reasonable, viable legal options” and said it would be “premature” for the party’s federal executive to intervene in the NSW division over the administrative debacle.
“We owe it to our party members, to the candidates, and the general public, to explore any opportunities there might be legally to rectify the situation,” Speakman said.
The Liberals’ federal director, Andrew Hirst, wrote to federal executive members on Sunday giving notice of a meeting on 3 September to consider whether there were grounds under the party’s federal constitution to intervene and, if so, what form that should take.
Hirst’s letter said the online meeting would consider the status of federal election preparations in NSW including “the impact of recent events on those preparations”.
Guardian Australia understands possibilities include partial intervention related only to preparations for the federal election or full intervention, which could involve more extensive administrative, financial and political direction.
The NSW Liberals have said the state’s electoral commission breached election regulations by only providing five days of official notice before the close of nominations, instead of the necessary seven.
The acting electoral commissioner, Matthew Phillips, on Sunday said he did not consider it a “realistic possibility” that Liberal HQ could have been unaware of the nomination deadline given it had been communicated to them and advertised widely.
The NSW Liberals had not confirmed if they would pursue a legal challenge against the commission by 5pm Monday.
Graeme Orr, a professor of politics and electoral law at University of Queensland, said the Liberals were running out of time to file a court action and he didn’t think they had a great chance of winning anyway.
“It would be unusual to say that that deadline, that was known to all the candidates and parties five days in advance, was somehow completely void and has to be re-fixed.
“Even if they had a good case in substance, they’d be running up against the electoral commission and the judge saying … what orders could be legitimately made?”
Orr said a court may not consider a new election date could be practically set given thousands of ballots had to be printed and distributed across the state in time for early voting from 7 September.
“One can feel sorry for the councillors involved, who may have negligence claims against the party, and for the voters who support them,” Orr said.
“But it’s hard to unscramble so many smashed eggs in an election period, without risking the logistics of the election itself.”
Election expert Michael Maley, a former Australian Electoral Commission official and co-convener of the Electoral Regulation Research Network, believed the Liberals were unlikely to succeed.
Maley said there had been “quite a lot” of information on the public record about the closing date for nominations.
“The fact that [the commission] hadn’t published the formal notice until a couple of days after they should have done doesn’t seem to me to be a very potent argument,” he said.
“The bigger picture is not a legal one, [it’s] how on earth could you get to the point where you knew that you were in trouble in getting your paperwork together and you still didn’t do anything about it?”
