Claim votes can’t be published for 72 hours after election is false
David Williams
May 14, 2025
WHAT WAS CLAIMED
Vote counts are not allowed to be published for three days after polls close in Australia.
OUR VERDICT
False. There is no law that delays the release of preliminary vote counts.
AAP FactCheck – There is no Australian law that prohibits federal election count results from being published for three days after the poll, despite claims on social media.
The Australian Electoral Commission1 (AEC) says the claim is false, and there is no mention of that requirement under election laws.
The claim appears in a Facebook post2 featuring a screenshot of an ABC News headline reporting Labor’s May 3, 2025 election victory.
“Labor politicians DID NOT win,” the post says.
“The public can not prove labor politicians won, when criminal politicians, criminal AEC management, and criminal ‘media directors’ publish so called ‘wins’ at 9pm, only 3 hours after the 6pm close of poll.”
The post then lists supposed reasons why calling an election at 9pm on election night was not possible.
Those include that 99 per cent of ballots hadn’t been counted correctly with preferences, votes hadn’t been entered into computers, scrutineering was still underway and declaration votes hadn’t been counted.
“The 1918 Electoral law and AEC website specifies vote results are not to be published for 3 days (72 hours),” the post says.
The law cited is the Commonwealth Electoral Act 19183, the latest version of which was published on February 21, 2025.
AAP FactCheck searched the act but found no reference to any restriction or ban on publishing vote results within three days of polls closing.
While the act contains some references to “three days” in other contexts, such as the postal vote application deadline before polling day (Section 184(5)), none relate to the publication of election results.
On the contrary, Section 284(1) says that after it’s known which candidate has been elected in a seat, the AEC official responsible for conducting the election in that seat must publicly declare their name “as soon as practicable”.
The same officer must also send a written statement setting out the number of votes received by each candidate “as soon as practicable” to the electoral commissioner under Section 284 (2A).
The AEC routinely publishes preliminary results on election night, beginning shortly after the close of polling.
These include first-preference counts and two-candidate preferred projections, which are updated in the AEC’s Virtual Tally Room4.
The AEC said the claim was false, and that such a 72-hour restriction would be “ridiculous and undemocratic”.
“There is absolutely no requirement in the Commonwealth Electoral Act that prevents the AEC from publishing vote counts within 72 hours of polls closing,” an AEC spokesperson told AAP FactCheck.
“In fact, it’s quite the opposite – the Electoral Act requires the AEC to publish the two-candidate preferred count for each House of Representatives seat as part of our election night work in order to allow electoral analysts, journalists, and candidates to make predictions about the likely outcome in each seat.”
On the AEC’s standard procedure for releasing preliminary vote counts on election night, the spokesperson said the raw data from the count in each of the 150 House of Representatives seats was published to the AEC’s Virtual Tally Room website5.
The AEC spokesperson said there was “absolutely not” any legal or procedural basis for the claim that results are not to be published for three days.
“This should be immediately apparent to anybody in Australia who has ever watched five minutes of election night coverage,” they said.
AAP FactCheck is an accredited member of the International Fact-Checking Network6. To keep up with our latest fact checks, follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Threads7, X, BlueSky8, TikTok9 and YouTube10. (AAP)
