We are on increasingly short odds for a recount in the NSW seat of Bradfield with only a cigarette paper’s worth of votes between the Liberal Party’s Gisele Kapterian and independent Nicolette Boele.
After starting the day about 80 votes behind, Boele has made ground through the declaration pre-poll and postal counts to be just 43 short at 3pm.
Nicolette Boele and Gisele Kapterian.
There are 314 votes to be counted (plus any other postal votes that come in tomorrow).
To get in front, Boele needs to secure about 57 per cent of the remaining votes.
In the event of the result being within 100 votes, there will be an automatic recount of all votes. The last recount occurred in 2016 when Labor’s Cath O’Toole won the seat of Herbert by just 37 votes.
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That seems like luxury compared with the closest ever election, in the seat of Ballarat all the way back in 1919. On that occasion, Nationalist Edwin Kerby won by a single vote over sitting member, Labor’s Charles McGrath.
That result was challenged in the Court of Disputed Returns where a young justice, Isaac Isaacs (who would go on to be the nation’s first Australia-born governor-general), criticised the handling of the election by officials.
He ordered a new election which McGrath comfortably won.