BREAKING NEWS Australian election rocked by scandal after missing ballot papers are found at electoral worker's home
About 2,000 missing ballot papers that went missing on election night have been found in the home of a temeporary Australian Electoral Commission worker.
Because the votes had already been counted, the incident did not impact the result in the NSW seat of Barton.
'Ballot papers were securely packaged in the presence of scrutineers with an authorised transport officer collecting two ballot paper transport containers for delivery to a central counting centre to await further processing,' an AEC spokesperson said in a statement.
The AEC revealed that a worker collected 1,866 House of Representatives votes in a secure container from a Hurstville polling booth on May 3 but did not deliver it to the central counting facility.
'The staff member responsible erroneously returned one less container than was expected.'
AEC officials only noticed the ballots were missing last week.
'The AEC's tracking processes for ballot paper transport containers identified that one of the two transport containers for the Hurstville polling place was not returned to the central counting centre on election night as it should have been,' the spokesperson said.
'This issue relates to a single transport container that remained sealed and intact and has not affected the election,' the AEC said.
'The uniquely coded security seals were not broken, and the AEC's purpose-built ballot paper transport container was intact.
'All ballot papers are accounted for.
'The AEC takes ballot paper handling extremely seriously.'
The Barton seat was won by Labor's Ash Ambihaipahar, who secured over 60 per cent of the two-party-preferred vote, beating Liberal candidate Fiona Douskou.
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