> On 11 July 2014 13:43, Stephen Loosley wrote: >> ???The AEC hardline position in trying to discredit Mr Cordover as a >> vexatious litigant is an abuse of the law under which the AEC operates and >> raises the very relevant question, what do they have to hide?"
On Fri, Jul 11, 2014 at 02:00:32PM +1000, Jim Birch wrote: > The Palmer bug? :) > > More realistically, the way that the senate count works is open to > procedural interpretation as variation in the counting order could change > the result. (I would have thought.) The only random element in the Senate count is the process to follow when two or more candidates for election or exclusion have the same number of votes, and they aren't eligible to be bulk excluded and they also had the same number of votes at all previous stages of the count. Then (and only then) may one be selected by the State Electoral Commissioner for election/exclusion - perhaps by tossing a coin, but possibly deliberatively. Not only is that circumstance very unlikely, the selection would then most likely just affect a few subsequent stages of the count. To be significant it would need to set off a cascade effect in the order of subsequent exclusions to affect the actual election result. And in the event of a tie for the last place with all candidates having equal votes all the way back to the start of the count, then the State Electoral Commissioner gets a deliberative casting vote. Read the Senate Section of the Act (s273). It's hard to imagine that any of the MPs who enacted it had any idea exactly how the bulk exclusion process (13A) might be actually carried out. <http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/cea1918233/s273.html> I was a contractor to AEC in the mid 1990s when this software was being developed. I can't understand why they never made it open-source, but my recollection was that the developers ended up with partial or complete ownership of the software even though they were paid to write it by the AEC. Someone might have stuffed up the assignment of IP terms in a contract... Chris _______________________________________________ Link mailing list Link@mailman.anu.edu.au http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
