It ordered a count of those for Narungga, due to how close the seat was.<\/p>\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/d4a7c6ae49df17a7b886024f9adfcea4.jpeg\")
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An official counts votes in Adelaide while scrutineers including One Nation MLC Carlos Quaremba (centre) and Liberal Party director Alex Hyde (right) look on, along with acting electoral commissioner Leah McLay (left). (ABC News: Ben Pettitt)<\/p>\n
In a statement, acting Electoral Commissioner Leah McLay said of the 81 ballots, 46 were for Ms Thomas and 30 went to Liberal candidate Tania Stock.<\/p>\n
She said one ballot was rejected and four were deemed informal.<\/p>\n
“Had the ballot papers been included in the original count and subsequent recount, the margin in favour of Chantelle Thomas One Nation would have increased from 58 to 74,” she said.<\/p>\n
The electoral commission declared Ms Thomas<\/a> as the winner of the the seat after a recount on April 1 and 2.<\/p>\n At the time, Ms Thomas won the seat by 58 votes, or a 0.1 per cent margin.<\/p>\n Concern about uncounted postal votes<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Ms Stock says there are more than 100 postal votes still to be counted in the electorate as part of a dispute over security question discrepancies.<\/p>\n She said the voters had submitted one answer to a security question online but then wrote a slightly different response on the envelope they put their ballot in.<\/p>\n Liberal candidate Tania Stock is a Yorke Peninsua Council councillor. (Facebook: Tania Stock – Liberal for Narungga)<\/p>\n “The electoral commission have put in place a system where the voter needs to provide a question and an answer and the question might be: ‘What was your first car?'” Ms Stock told the ABC.<\/p>\n “And they have written in their online application that their first car was a Holden.<\/p>\n “But when they’ve received their ballot paper they’ve written down that \u2026 it was a Commodore.<\/p>\n “Because it wasn’t an exact word match \u2026 then there’s discrepancy there.<\/p>\n “That vote has been determined as informal and therefore unopened, but the voter is unaware that their vote hasn’t been opened and counted.”<\/p>\n Ms Stock said it was “another failing” of how the electoral commission conducted the election, as it lent towards more reliance on online forms and an electronic electoral roll.<\/p>\n “There would need to be a willingness from the commission to open those votes, but at this point in time they are still in contention,” she said.<\/p>\n Independent review welcomed<\/p>\n One Nation upper house MP Carlos Quaremba said Ms Thomas had extended her margin of victory, and said he was pleased the matter had now been resolved.<\/p>\n “It was a good result \u2014 a good result I think for the people of Narungga,” he said.<\/p>\n “It’s just finally good to have all this behind us and looking forward to Chantelle taking her position and representing the people of Narungga.”<\/p>\n Carlos Quaremba welcomes the result for the seat of Narungga. (ABC News)<\/p>\n Mr Quaremba welcomed yesterday’s announcement of an independent review into how the state election was handled, but said he thought “a parliamentary review is actually probably more important”.<\/p>\n “Properly run elections are the cornerstone of any democracy,” he said.<\/p>\n Asked whether he was concerned about the possibility of further missing votes, he said he would “rather not speculate”.<\/p>\n “The electoral commission have got a pretty difficult job to do \u2014 I’ll leave that up to them,” he said.<\/p>\n The electoral commission has already faced criticism over how the poll was run on March 21, including in regard to understaffing<\/a>, delays on election day<\/a> caused by difficulties logging into the electronic electoral roll and how the First Nations Voice vote was handled<\/a>.<\/p>\n The commission has previously said it would review how the state election was handled, as it does after every election.<\/p>\n Special Minister of State Kyam Maher said on Thursday the government would also commission an independent review.<\/p>\n Liberal leader Ashton Hurn said on Friday that the electoral commission still had a lot to explain.<\/p>\n “There have been a litany of issues that do require not only an investigation but answers specifically from the commission,” she said.<\/p>\n “It’s left a lot to be desired.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One Nation has retained the South Australian seat of Narungga, following a count of ballots that were missed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":612313,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[284568,231054,4268,231053,43,278287,44,296449,69113,41,39,42,40,25159],"class_list":{"0":"post-612312","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-chantelle-thomas","9":"tag-ecsa","10":"tag-election","11":"tag-electoral-commission","12":"tag-headlines","13":"tag-narungga","14":"tag-news","15":"tag-recount","16":"tag-result","17":"tag-top-news","18":"tag-top-stories","19":"tag-topnews","20":"tag-topstories","21":"tag-yorke-peninsula"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/612312","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=612312"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/612312\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/612313"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=612312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=612312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=612312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/1776405491_740_d6533096c6319ee10e846fab189141ac.jpeg\")
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