libs poised to claim wa govt , page-5

that's very true opaline.
My experience with elections over 27 years tells me though, that during the watching of the abc tv internet feeds last night suggests there was either an under staffing situation or inexperienced presiding officers as some of the data was very slow and the presenters were visibly upset with the data feeds and slow booth reporting as well as changing % of the vote counted in numerous seats. It is also possible they had problems with the technology they were using to record and send the data.
I have witnessed some extraordinarily inefficient presiding officers over the years ( and some very professional and competent presiding officers).
I had 20 years in government and on many occasions did presentations on the electoral preference distributions/ data analysis etc.
From the limited overview I conducted last night and again this morning, the calling of seats one way or another had numerous errors in assumptions. A lot of the commentators and media are calling it as "too close to call" but that's not true. Labor has lost government. The Nats for tactical positioning have said they are in discussions with both major parties but they know their supporters are very right wing and would never support forming a government with anyone but the Liberals.
Both Smith and Bishop who sat as panellists on the abc tv coverage were clearly out of their depth judging by the nervous attempts they made at trying to sound like they knew what their parties scrutineers were reporting from the booths in relation to preferences. From my experience, most scrutineers appointed by candidates do not understand the issues associated with observing the count of preferences and reporting. The mistake they mostly make is they watch the primary count, when what they should be doing is recording the preference votes as the ballot papers are unfolded and by recording random samples of preferences they can call the results from each booth prior to the completion of the primary count. The other problem is that most scrutineers actually phone through the primary count but as they haven't recorded the preference distribution , it's left to the electoral commission to do and that's one of the primary reasons that there is so much confusion about who is really in front on the count. Of course, in close seats like Riverton, forrestfield, collie-preston, albany, moore, alfred cove and morely, clarity suffers because there is still in some cases , only 44.7% of the primary vote counted and some have had not one booth distribute preferences. There's only about 22,000 votes in total in most seats which is so low compared to some of the larger local authority seats and state and federal booth numbers in many places around Australia. The counting should be an easy exercise.
The other data that should be known by the political parties is what percentage of the postals they expect based on the numbers of applications they sent out to electors and forwarded to the electoral commission. The pre polls can also be used to give a pretty close indication to the parties that had their act together and did exit polling at the seats that had close margins, eg, within a 6% spread .
PS, I am not a member of a political party.