Further electoral hitches have come to light days after South Australia’s statewide poll, with the state’s Electoral Commission (ECSA) apologising to staff who have not yet been fully paid.
In an email sent out to impacted staff, an ECSA official said the commission understood that there were people who were “yet to be remunerated for the time they have worked, particularly those who worked on polling day”.
The official said that those staff were due to be paid this week, but “with unavoidable payroll processing delays and the Easter period, we are unable to meet that deadline for all staff”.
In a subsequent statement to the ABC, the commission said it was “working to ensure all payments are made as soon as possible”.
“ECSA apologises to the staff who have been affected by a delay in payroll processing for shifts during the state election,” a spokesperson said.
Frank Banks, who was a polling booth manager on election day, said he had not yet been paid and that he knew of people who had been relying on receiving payment before the Easter long weekend.
“Plenty of people who worked quite hard, quite honestly, quite professionally for the Electoral Commission — they’re going to have to go through Easter missing some serious funds,” he said.
“A very good friend of mine worked at a booth out north … she’s on an aged pension and really lives pay cheque to pay cheque.”
Mr Banks said he hoped staff would get paid as soon as possible but the delay had not deterred him from future electoral work.
“Working in an election is like working in a pub or a restaurant on a really busy Saturday — lots of work but quite rewarding,” he said.
The 2026 South Australian election was held on March 21. (ABC News: Trent Murphy)
Spalding local Cameron Bridges said he worked as a polling booth assistant in the Mid North town for about 13 hours on election day.
He said he was not sure exactly how much he was owed but suspected it was several hundred dollars.
“[I] was looking forward to getting a boost, especially given how things are financially at the moment, and to be facing this uncertainty — it’s frustrating,” he said.
Mr Bridges said he did not receive key paperwork until a week and a half after election day.
“I trusted that I would get paid, eventually, but I was a little bit worried about how long it was going to take and to this day I still don’t have a date as to when it’s going to happen,” he said.
“It feels like it’s been very disorganised — I’ve seen a lot of Facebook posts about people complaining about there being staff shortages, and I wonder how many temporary staff didn’t rock up because they never got a letter of offer.”
Mr Bridges said he hoped the commission would “look into what went wrong and why it went wrong so they can make sure it doesn’t happen again”.
Pay to be part of ‘comprehensive review’
ECSA said the cause of the pay delay would be “part of a comprehensive review of” the state election, which will also focus on other issues.
The recent poll was beset by various difficulties such as technical glitches that triggered long lines at polling stations.
Earlier in the week, SA Premier Peter Malinauskas said understaffing had been a potential cause.
Long waits at several polling booths, like this one at Goodwood, were reported on election day. (ABC News: Evelyn Leckie)
“We’ve seen more challenges, logistically, at this election than many others that have gone before it,” he said on Tuesday.
“Understaffing has been one thing that’s been reported and people were lining up a lot longer than usual even though so many ballots were cast before the day.”
South Australia’s Opposition Leader Ashton Hurn also raised questions about the length of time it had taken for some seats to be called.
“We’ve got to look at whether the Electoral Commission is properly resourced to make sure that they can count everything that they need to in a really timely manner,” she said earlier this week.