Labor has claimed victory in the marginal West Australian seat of Cowan after 200 votes were found incorrectly sorted into a pile for the Liberal candidate, while the ABC’s election analyst Antony Green says the Coalition has finally won majority.
Australian Electoral Commission officials found the 200 votes on Monday morning at the Tapping booth in WA.
The votes had been cast for the Greens but they had been put in the pile for the Liberal incumbent, Luke Simpkins, on election night.
The bulk of the Greens’ preferences have gone to Labor’s candidate, Anne Aly, and it has pushed her lead out to 787 votes – ahead of Simpkins. Labor now believes Aly’s lead is unassailable.
If the new figures are correct and the seat falls to Labor, it will bring to an end a bruising election fight for Aly.
“It has been a long wait, and it has been a very emotional ride,” Aly said on Monday.
“I know I have a huge task ahead of me in proving that [voter’s] faith in me was not misplaced, and I just hope I don’t let them down.”
Simpkins says there are still many votes to be counted and he will not concede until the numbers are clearer.
On Monday afternoon, the ABC said the Coalition could now claim to have won 76 seats needed to form majority government.
Aly is a deradicalisation expert who has been invited to a White House summit on countering violent extremism and whose work has seen her put on terrorist kill lists. She would also be the first Muslim woman to be elected to the House of Representatives.
During the election, the justice minister, Michael Keenan, suggested Aly had intervened last year in the criminal hearings of radical Islamists to reduce their sentences.
The foreign affairs minister, Julie Bishop, backed up Keenan’s claims, saying Aly wrote a letter for a known hate preacher “in an attempt to get him off jail time.”
Aly accused Keenan of a despicable smear and Labor attacked the Coalition’s tactics.
Last week, after the election, Bishop claimed on the ABC’s 7.30 that the Coalition had tried to maintain a positive, upbeat campaign, saying: “We didn’t get into the gutter.”
Cowan is the last House of Representatives seat in Western Australia to be declared by the major parties.
The Tapping booth had reported an unusually low Greens vote of 1.4% in this election, compared with 8% in the last election.
Phil Diak from the Australian Electoral Commission said a fresh scrutiny of votes cast at the Tapping polling place found 200 votes attributed to Simpkins that should have been allocated to the Greens candidate’s pile.
He said the recheck was managed by permanent AEC staff at the divisional scrutiny centre and was a normal process undertaken in every seat.
“The resulting impact on the two-candidate preferred count is around 160 votes moved from Liberal to ALP,” he said.
