A South Australian One Nation candidate has questioned how new electoral laws impacted the electoral commission after uncounted votes thrust her seat of Narungga into a third vote count.
Chantelle Thomas claimed the Yorke Peninsula seat two weeks ago on a razor-thin margin of just 58 votes.
The March 21 vote was so close that a recount was called in the electorate to ensure there were no errors.
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But South Australia's Electoral Commission (ECSA) today ordered a second recount of the vote after 81 unopened ballot papers were found in the neighbouring district of Stuart.
The unopened batch of votes was collected from the Port Pirie early voting centre on Tuesday, Deputy Premier Kyam Maher said.
The commission said its acting commissioner Leah McLay contacted all candidates to notify them of the third count.
"Following the discovery of votes that have not been counted, I have secured the unopened ballot papers and have ordered a further count for the district of Narungga," McLay said.
"The Commission will support any independent external review into the 2026 State Election and South Australian First Nations Voice to Parliament Election."
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The recount will take place tomorrow, attended by scrutineers and McLay herself.
Thomas slammed news of the recount as "very disappointing for my community in Narungga".
"We're being forced to wait – again – to see who will be Narungga's representative in Parliament," she said.
"Let's be clear: this raises serious questions about the integrity of the South Australian election, whether the electoral commission was fully prepared for it, and how Labor's new electoral laws – passed with Liberal support – impacted on the electoral commission's preparations.
"Like everyone else, I'll have to wait for the count on Friday. Afterwards I'm sure there will be more to say about it."
An independent review into the election has been ordered by the government, Maher said.
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"Elections are incredibly complex things to undertake. There are thousands of employees, hundreds of polling booths and over a million votes to count," Maher said.
"We are now finalising terms of reference and in an addition to that an independent review of how the election was conducted and voters experience."
Narungga was the final lower house seat to be called in the election, granting Pauline Hanson's conservative party its fourth seat in Parliament.
Thomas defeated fellow Yorke Peninsula local and Liberal candidate Tania Stock to claim the seat.
The South Australian Liberal Party was reduced to five seats in the Labor Party's landslide victory on election night.
SA Liberal Party leader Ashton Hurn called the vote count bungle "hugely concerning" and said ECSA has "a lot of explaining to do".
"There's been a string of errors really from the Electoral Commission and I think we need to get to the bottom of how this was able to occur because that will mean into the future we can make sure that it doesn't happen again," she said.
"If a batch of votes can essentially vanish into thin air and then appear four weeks later, it does raise questions about other seats."
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