If it were passed, how would results be announced for future elections? How is it done in Australia?
I don't think it would change the way results are announced, as I don't think (?) that's prescribed by law.
Over here they report at a booth-by-booth level. Actually, I've been spending a lot of time recently on the AEC website looking at results... here's a link if you'd like to take a look:
http://results.aec.gov.au/13745/Website/HouseDivisionFirstPrefs-13745-215.htmThis first page tallies all the votes received by all candidates in the electorate, and provides the 2PP result below. The way it lists primary vote here is the same as in the UK, so I'd assume it would be done like this one. Clicking on the link (at the top) "Full Distribution of Preferences" will lead to further information that I'd assume the UK would provide.
The AEC also breaks it down into booth-by-booth results, both for primary votes and also for 2PP. The other page that is particularly interesting is the "Two Candidate Preferred Preference Flow" page... it shows what proportion of the vote for each excluded candidate went to one of the two final candidates. You can see that 83.37% of Greens voters gave a higher preference to the Labor candidate than to the Liberal incumbent. These results are provided for each electorate, but not for booth-by-booth results.
If your question is how will the results actually be counted on the night... well, I'd assume it would be much the same as it is now - where the votes are all taken to a central location to be counted, and are then put into piles for each candidate. Over here, this is all done at each polling booth. I've only ever scrutineered in electorates where it's obvious which two parties are going to be the leading two, but in all electorates, the Electoral Commission determines which two candidates will be used for the purposes of providing a 2CP figure on the night (note, this is notional and for the purposes of reporting to the media, it doesn't affect the final count if the voters voted differently to how the Electoral Commission thought they'd vote).
If it's being counted at a central location in the UK, it's likely that it will not be hard for the Returning Officer to follow a full distribution of preferences on the night. Over here, minor candidates are just... I might start this bit again...
Over here, the process by which votes are counted is this:
At 6pm the doors are locked. If there is still a queue to vote, an electoral officer will go to the end of the line and no one queuing after the officer will be allowed to vote. Once the last voter is out of the polling station, the doors are locked. Any scrutineers must be in the room before then. The polling official in charge of the station brings all the boxes that have been used at that booth together. In the morning, the boxes were sealed with plastic tags (like ziplocks) which are serially numbered, and the numbers have been recorded and signed by a witness (frequently a scrutineer, but could be the first voter in the booth, for example). A scrutineer will witness the tags on the boxes and confirm that the numbers are the same as the numbers recorded in the morning. At about the same time, polling officials will count the number of votes issued from the books (similar to note pads, with perferations and are also serially numbered). The boxes are opened by cutting off the tags, and the ballots emptied onto the table. Voters fold their ballot papers in half before putting them into the box, so the next stage involves polling officials unfolding the ballots and stacking them ready for sorting. They then sort the ballots into piles for each of the candidates by first preference vote, also checking for formality. When all the primary votes have been counted, the total is checked against the number of ballots issued and if there is any difference, the votes are re-counted. If there is still a difference, polling officials will normally look in bins, etc, for the missing ballots, although if the difference is small, it's assumed a voter may have walked out of the polling station with a ballot in their pocket or something (remember, we have compulsory voting, so there are people there who don't necessarily want to vote). They then count preferences by taking the stack of votes for each minor candidate (one candidate at a time) and putting their votes into two piles - one for each of the candidates that they're doing a notional 2CP for. That gives the notional 2CP, although in most electorates it's not just notional because there are no strong third candidates.
In the UK, because the votes are counted in a central location, a full distribution of preferences could probably be carried out (where they eliminate candidates one by one and allocate their preferences to all remaining candidates), rather than simply allocating preferences to one of two predominant candidates, especially since there are electorates which are fairly marginal three-way splits. That said, it's also possible that they'll just simply allocate preferences to different sets of candidates, ie Con v Lab, Con v Lib, Lib v Lab and give three different sets of notional results, pending the final count of any postal votes still to be received (or are they received before the day and counted on the night?). Anyway, if postals have already been received, I think it likely that they'll do a full distribution of preferences on the night and be able to give accurate 2PP results.
