Count scrutineers critical

The Murray Irrigation Limited director elections must be re-held, according to director Chris Brooks.

His stance has been supported by some of the election’s scrutineers, who said the integrity of the election was compromised when CorpVote released incorrect results Wednesday morning.

Mr Brooks said the error ‘‘does not fill me or any other shareholder with confidence’’, and suggested the election needed to be redone.

Election scrutineer Russell Tait said he was ‘‘personally upset and disappointed’’ in the election process.

He said scrutineers were dismissed before the declaration of the vote on Tuesday evening.

Fellow scrutineer Shane Ringin suggested the wrong announcement debacle may have been avoided had they been allowed to stay.

‘‘When I heard that Phil Snowden, Bruce Simpson and Tim McKindlay were elected I could not believe it; I felt McKindlay would have come last with the ballots I saw,’’ Mr Tait said.

‘‘I think the whole thing (the election process) has been a shambles from the start and that continued at the vote count.’’

Mr Ringin, who was hired as an independent scrutineer by Waander van Beek and specified he has had no prior involvement with Murray Irrigation, said the misannouncement of the results calls into question the integrity of the results overall.

‘‘If we had been allowed to stay until the end, maybe we would not have had this mistake. I would think shareholders must be questioning the integrity of the results.

‘‘When I saw the results on the website on Wednesday morning I was incredulous; on the votes I saw Waander had at least 50 per cent of them.

‘‘I was told he placed fourth, which would have put James Sides last. On the votes I saw, James also received a lot of votes.’’

CorpVote said the error became apparent after a routine internal audit of the results conducted last Wednesday morning by the company’s principal Tim Jones, who was the election’s appointed ballot administrator.

Mr Jones said CorpVote’s internal audit protocols confirmed the integrity of their systems.

‘‘As embarrassing as this error has been we felt it was important to amend the results as soon as they became apparent to us. We have never made an error of this magnitude in the nine years we’ve been operating,’’ he said.

Voting in the election closed on Tuesday last week.

Of the 2414 eligible votes, 1405 admissible ballot papers (58 per cent) were returned, of which 19 ballot papers were invalid. This compares with a 41 per cent participation rate in 2015.