Staff needed to work across 7,500 polling places, with Covid contingency planning adding to challenges
The pandemic, though, will add to this election’s challenges. For instance, each polling place will have a hygiene officer, and the AEC has to be ready in case local jurisdictions impose last-minute restrictions to cope with spikes in Covid cases.
“We’ve got more people handing out ballot papers than we’ve ever had before,” Ekin-Smyth said. Even so, “there’s certainly the potential for queueing to be longer this federal election that it has been in the past due to Covid”. “We don’t have a set benchmark for Covid reservers, but rather we are working hard to have as many registrations of interest as possible to enable us to call on people as needed,” Ekin-Smyth said.
A shortening of the pre-polling period this election from three weeks to two at least means hiring stints may be shorter for some employees this time around. The AEC has increased the number of early polling sites to more than 500.