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Proportional Representation Society of
Australia Inc. |
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| A0048538N Victoria | www.prsa.org.au
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+61429176725 |
| ABN 31 010 090 247 | info@prsa.org.au | 2025-08-20 |
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Click on a
blue hyperlink of interest.
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1. Types of
assistance with the scrutiny
PRSA Inc. conducts counts
for systems other than proportional
representation using the single transferable
vote (PR-STV) if required, as such
counts can demonstrate the advantages of PR-STV over
other systems, and also as PR-STV is not applicable
for elections for a single position.
However, it does not count elections that are not
systems of direct election
of candidates - such as
those using party
list systems - which it strongly opposes.
For larger-scale elections, consider contacting the
Victorian Electoral Commission, or that of another
State or Territory, about its fee-for-service
work. PRSA Inc. can, as its clients require, provide one of the following five types of service to assist with the scrutiny:
TYPE 1
- Counting by PRSA Inc. at your premises:
One or more of PRSA Inc’s Accredited
PR-STV Vote-counting Officers can visit your
premises in the Melbourne metropolitan area and
conduct the count for, or assist, your Returning
Officer manually on paper, or that PRSA Inc. Officer
or Officers can use our counting program, either
with your computer or computers, or if you have no
computers, with a laptop computer brought by us.
Visits by PRSA Inc. Officers can be within or
outside normal working hours, by arrangement. TYPE 2
- You enter voting data on a prescribed
spreadsheet that PRSA Inc. then counts:
The cost of a visit is very much reduced if you sort
the ballot-papers into stacks according to the first
preference votes shown and then key - stack by
stack, taking the stacks characterized by the first
preference candidate distinctive to each one in the
same order as the candidates' names appear on the
ballot-paper - the preferences shown on the
ballot-papers into a prescribed Excel
spreadsheet that PRSAV-T Inc.
supplies you in accordance with written instructions
it provides, so its program can utilize that
spreadsheet to conduct the count. That spreadsheet has inbuilt
warnings to alert the user to informal ballots, or
formal ballots with duplication or omission of later
preference markings. It also sums the first
preference votes for each candidate for you to check
against your own count of them after you have sorted
and stacked ballots as above.
TYPE 3
- Contact
by internet, or digital media posted to
PRSA Inc:
As for Type 2 above, except that PRSA Inc. does
not visit you, but instead receives the completed prescribed Excel
spreadsheet by email, USB drive or
CD-ROM posted to it at the above address, or placed
on a nominated web page, after which PRSA Inc. would
then email or otherwise send you a results sheet as
an Excel spreadsheet or, if required, as a
colour hypertext or PDF file for display on your
website, or a Certificate of Computation of Election
Results, as with Type 2. This approach is by far the
cheapest option as it can use a minimum of 30
minutes of our time, and hence attract only our
minimum charge, except where irregularities, or
extra, unusual or non-standard arrangements, or a
large scale poll, occur, and require more time. This
Type 3 Service also serves as a re-assurance and
confirmation for Returning Officers that prefer, or
are required, to conduct a manual count.
TYPE 4
- Submitting paper records to PRSA Inc:
You can deliver the ballot-papers, or a certified
copy of the information on them, to PRSA Inc. at the
above address. It can count them and post or email a
result back. TYPE 5
- Appointment of a PRSA Inc. Officer as your
Returning Officer: Alternatively,
PRSA Inc. can provide one of its Accredited PR-STV
Vote-counting Officers to be appointed by the client
as the Returning Officer for the election, and that
can extend to PRSA Inc. conducting the entire
election, including the printing of ballot-papers,
and the posting and receiving back of electoral
material by post in the case of a postal ballot. Please note that PRSA Inc.
requires notice of at least three weeks before the
date on which it is first required to post material,
and requires a minimum interval of three weeks
between the date on which nominations are to be
sought and the close of nominations if it is asked
to call for nominations, and a minimum interval of
three weeks between the date prescribed for its
posting ballot-papers and the close of the ballot.
Results
file in hypertext (.html) format, or in
PDF format, with hypertext links:
As well as providing the client with a dated
report by an Accredited PR-STV Vote-counting Officer
on PRSA Inc. letterhead, the Society can produce a
hypertext or a PDF
results file, each with hypertext links, that it can
post or e-mail to you or place at a web page it
nominates, from which you can download it. You can
place that file on your website and thus avoid some
or all of the surcharges
on our base hourly charge as stated below.
Data
Entry:
The only significant time-consuming task is the
entry of the preference markings on each
ballot-paper either into a prescribed format of Excel
spreadsheet, or directly into the
computer while our program is running, where it is
saved. Our Officers’ rate of data entry is about
1,000 digits per hour, but skilled data entry
professionals should easily exceed that. Instruction
in the use of the Proportional
Representation Manual:
PRSA Inc. will provide an Accredited PR-STV
Vote-counting Officer to visit you, or for you to
visit, to answer questions on, and explain how to
apply, in a manual count, using the quota-preferential (PR-STV) Counting
Sheet it sells, the Rules of PRSA Inc. for Conducting
Elections by proportional representation using
the single transferable vote as set
out in its Proportional
Representation Manual. That will include, if
requested, having the client conduct, under that
Officer's supervision, a practice count for the
election described in Example 1 in the Proportional
Representation Manual, using the 65 ballot
papers relevant to that count that we will bring,
and that will demonstrate most of the situations and
possibilities that a Returning Officer is likely to
encounter in most moderate-sized election counts.
Alternatively, or additionally, PRSA Inc. can work
with you while you apply the Proportional
Representation Manual in an actual count you
need to conduct. Instruction service charges are the
same as our vote-counting charges below. Base
Hourly Charge: PRSA Inc's charges do not
include Goods and Services Tax, as it has not had to
register for GST, because its annual turnover is
below the threshold for that. PRSAV-T Inc. will
send you an Invoice for its services stating that. PRSA
Inc. has a base hourly
charge of $120.00 per Officer for the
time each of its Officers is working on your task,
and for any travelling involved, which is at half
that hourly rate. Usually one Officer is enough. There is also a charge
for the re-imbursement of reasonable transport
costs, which might be either for public
transport (as low as $4.30 per day for a
Senior) or for a private vehicle at
recommended RACV rates,
depending on the persons and locations involved, but
firm advance email quotations of that can be given.
PRSA Inc. recommends obtaining such written
quotations before using its services. The
hourly charge is the base hourly charge for service
above, and half that for travelling except where
those charges are added to if one or more of the four Surcharge hourly additions A-D
below apply. The minimum total charge for service is
$60.00, which is 50% of the base hourly charge. It
is most likely to apply for a Type
3 Service, in a case where none of the four
Surcharges A-D happens to apply. PRSA Inc. advice
on election rules, and its service
for filling of casual vacancies
for an election that it has conducted using a
computer count where such vacancies can be filled by
it electronically, are each free of charge. If the information on
the ballot-papers is supplied to PRSA Inc. in other
than the particular Excel
spreadsheet format it prescribes, its
charge for data entry
in the format it prescribes is the base hourly
charge above multiplied by the hours taken. The time
taken depends on the number of candidates and the
total number of ballot papers - both formal and
informal - it examines, as its Officers key in the
preference indications shown on those ballot papers
into the prescribed Excel spreadsheet that it uses
to compute the result. Where there are fewer
than 10 candidates, the preferences they key in are
just single digits, so they can enter at least 1,000
such preferences per hour. Data entry takes slightly
longer when double digit numbers are being entered.
That prescribed Excel spreadsheet has
inbuilt automatic detection of ballots as being
informal, so that they can be flagged, and thus
excluded from the count. Any postage or
telephone costs in returning the ballot-papers and
results will be charged, as will extra time caused
by irregularities or inconsistencies that are not
the fault of PRSA Inc. (at the base hourly
charge plus any of the applicable Surcharges A-D
below). The printout of the election result is
free, but a printout of more than four pages of the
table of preference markings for each vote costs 30
cents per page plus postage. Once data entry is
completed, or the prescribed Excel
spreadsheets loaded and joined to form a single
spreadsheet if necessary, the program is run, and a
result is obtained, almost immediately. In addition,
if requested, the data entered can be left with the
client as an Excel spreadsheet or PDF file
emailed to the client. A paper copy of that detailed
data can be provided, but with a large election that
can extend to a large number of pages. Any IBM-compatible
computer, running Windows 98 or later, or a Mac is
satisfactory. A single USB drive suffices. If a
printer is unavailable, the report is usually simple
enough to be transcribed from the monitor display or
as a screenshot,
but PRSAV-T Inc. can print a report and post or
email it to the client. PRSAV-T Inc. can usually
bring a laptop (to be used by its Officers only),
but many clients prefer to have it use their
personal computers. Filling
any casual
vacancies after a PR-STV
election: Click on the
hyperlink at left for more details. PRSA Inc.
recommends that the important principle of direct election by the voters
of all the representatives - as also specified in
Sections 7
and 24
of the Australian Constitution - be maintained in
the filling of casual vacancies by a prescribed
re-examination of the ballots cast at the election
at which the vacating representatives were elected. Elections
counted: One of the
largest-scale elections PRSA Inc. has assisted with
was the 1994 triennial postal ballot for the Council
of the Australian Conservation Foundation Inc. It
involved some 2,700 ballot-papers. In the ACF
Returning Officer's written report of the poll
result posted to all ACF members, she kindly
acknowledged PRSA Inc's assistance with the count.
PRSA Inc. also assisted with each of the ACF's
triennial postal
ballots from 2003 to 2012. Click here for a list of the organizations
for which PRSA Inc. has assisted with counting, or
has conducted the entire election.
Surcharges
A-D: The base hourly charge
per person assisting increases by 25 percent of the
base charge for each case, A to D below. It doubles
in the event - which good planning would normally
make unlikely - that all four surcharges A-D apply.
For single-vacancy
polls only, the expression, “majority-preferential method
(alternative vote)”
is to be substituted for the expression below, “proportional
representation using the single
transferable vote (PR-STV)”.
An acceptable alternative term for that latter
expression there, and below, is 'quota-preferential
method of proportional representation'.
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