chads hit NSW
From the Sydney Morning Herald

A computer glitch at the New South Wales Electoral Commission has thrown the upper house election results into turmoil and forced officials to manually count the 3,721,116 votes.

The software that distributes the preferences that will decide seats in the Legislative Council has malfunctioned three times in the past week, leaving officials angry and frustrated.

After false starts on Wednesday and Friday, party scrutineers were told yesterday morning that it would be at least tomorrow and possibly after Easter before the problem could be identified and fixed.

The program takes only two hours to spit out the results but if the problem cannot be fixed, the result will rely on the manual count which may take months. This will delay resumption of the upper house, which is due to sit on May 13.

Only 17 of the 21 seats to be declared have been decided by primary votes - a count that has taken 250 data entry operators almost three weeks since the March 22 poll. Labor has won nine seats, the Coalition seven and the Greens one.

The remaining four will be decided by a complicated series of preference distributions that the Electoral Commissioner, John Wasson, said yesterday would be "hard and messy" to complete without the help of computers.

Fortunately there are a couple of big, big differences from Florida. paper ballots give an audit trail and if necessary the count can go ahead by hand. If there are any court challenges the courts will be able to examine individual contested ballots. The whole process is in public hands including the software driving the count.

update
Third time lucky, the software performed flawlessly this afternoon and the election has now been completed.