South Australian Consolidated Acts South Australian Consolidated Acts (1) The
returning officer will—
(a) in
the case of an election or poll where voting closes at 12 noon—as
soon as practicable after the close of voting;
(b) in
the case of an election or poll where voting closes at 5 p.m.—on
the day following polling day for the election or poll (at a time determined
to be reasonable by the returning officer),
with the assistance of any other electoral officers who may be present, ensure
that all voting papers returned for the purposes of the election or poll in
accordance with this Act are made available for the purposes of this section.
(2) For the purposes
of the scrutiny of voting papers, the returning officer will, with the
assistance of any other electoral officers who may be present, and in the
presence of any scrutineers who may be present—
(a)
examine the declarations used for voting (and validly returned) and determine
which votes are to be accepted for further scrutiny and which rejected from
further scrutiny, rejecting unopened—
(i)
any envelope that forms part of a set of voting papers
that have been cancelled under this Act; and
(ii)
any two or more envelopes apparently from the same voter
(unless the voter has validly acted in two or more capacities); and
(iii)
any envelope where the voter's name does not appear on
the voters roll, unless the voter is voting on behalf of a body corporate or
group of persons in accordance with this Act, or unless the voter's name has
been omitted from the roll in error; and
(iv)
any envelope where the voter is purporting to be voting
on behalf of a body corporate or group of persons but the returning officer
concludes that the voter is in fact attempting to exercise an unauthorised
vote; and
(v)
any envelope where the signature does not, to the
satisfaction of the returning officer, correspond with the signature on the
application (if any) of the voter for the relevant voting papers; and
(b) tear
off the extensions to the envelope flaps on the envelopes accepted under
paragraph (a); and
(c)
rearrange the envelopes that no longer bear their tear-off extensions so that
the anonymity of voters is maintained; and
(d)
remove the ballot papers from those envelopes; and
(e) if
an envelope contains more than one ballot paper and a scrutineer challenges
the number of ballot papers contained in the envelope—satisfy himself or
herself that the envelope does not contain more ballot papers than the number
to which the voter is entitled and, if the returning officer is not so
satisfied, return all of those ballot papers to the envelope and reject them
from the count; and
(f)
examine the remaining ballot papers and reject any informal ballot papers; and
(g)
arrange all unrejected ballot papers into appropriate parcels for counting.