A removed section from the original Chapter 17: Aborting the Election. It has been removed from the main Series because it sits apart from the chapter’s account of the decision to stop the 2002 Board election and its consequences. It is retained here because it provides a revealing—and rather lighter—glimpse of what happened afterwards, when Roger Cowan and members of his management team informally reconstructed what the result might have been had voting continued.
The aborted election at Panthers in March 2002 added a little comedy to a stressful period. Voting was a subject of conjecture by Ian Temby and counsel at the Inquiry. The conclusions they reached were not accurate, according to Cowan.
On the Saturday after the election was cancelled, Cowan invited the management team and their partners to a barbecue at his home. To add interest, he promised they would find out who would have been elected had the ballot not been aborted. At first there was a little soul searching about the legality of counting an aborted ballot, but a quick call to the club’s legal expert soon put everybody at ease.
The clubs other than Penrith were a simple matter. They had all completed voting before the ballot was aborted. Penrith was a little more complicated because there were still two days of voting to go when the election was called off. But there were sufficient votes in to determine the trend. Up to the cancellation, a certain percentage of voters had, for example, voted for Barry Walsh. It was likely that the percentage would be similar in next lot of votes.
There was also sufficient experience of elections at Penrith to estimate the number of votes that would likely have been cast in those final two days. It then became a simple calculation to arrive at the probable number of votes that each candidate at the Penrith site would have received. These estimates could then be added to the actual votes from the other sites that would be very close to the outcome the election might have delivered.
The missing two days of voting at Penrith was vital to the calculation, and it was not taken into account by the Inquiry.
It was a pleasant evening. A few good bottles of red wine had added a bit of sparkle to proceedings and everyone took a place around a table that would serve as the tally room.
Who would have been elected had the ballot been completed?
There were a few guesses – even a few friendly challenges. Would the How-to-Vote ticket at Newcastle and Port Macquarie swamp the Penrith votes, and fulfil the fears of the Five? If Newcastle and Port Macquarie were successful in getting their four candidates elected, which four of the current Board would miss out? In that gathering it was a unanimous hope that it would be the Footy Five.
The total number of votes cast for all clubs including Penrith was only a little over 3,000. Penrith accounted for more than 1,000, around 900 voted at Newcastle and about 700 at Port Macquarie. The other clubs made up the total.1
The ticket distributed by Newcastle and Port was partly effective, but there was another voting result that came as no surprise to the management team. A large proportion of the voters at both sites supported the re-election of the existing board in its entirety.
Before the counting of the Penrith votes, the candidates at Port Macquarie and Newcastle
were in front of some of the Penrith candidates.
The votes cast at the Penrith site were strongly in support of retaining all sitting directors. As the votes mounted, the candidates from the other clubs continued to slide down towards defeat. At the end of the exercise, the management team and their partners erupted in laughter and called for more wine.
For those around the table, the irony was irresistible. Their reconstruction suggested that, by aborting the election, the Footy Five may have outsmarted themselves. All but one appeared likely to have been returned with a clear majority. Evans would have missed out. He had resigned the previous year, and as a non-sitting director, his name did not have the customary asterisk beside it on the voting form. Terry Heidtmann was in a neck and neck battle for the ninth seat. With only a few more votes than the number estimate for the missing two days of voting, the reconstruction indicated that he too was likely to have been re-elected.
Related Topics
- Part 59 — The Ballot That Never Finished
- Part 60 — The Consequence of a Decision
- Part 57 — When Membership Became a Threat
Related Themes
Conflict · Board Decisions · Governance
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- The 2002 ballot was not a conventional Panthers election. It was the first in which members from the amalgamating clubs participated and voting had been completed at the other sites before the election was stopped. The reconstructed result therefore combined actual votes already cast with an estimate of the remaining two days of voting at Penrith; it should be understood as an informed reconstruction rather than an official election result. ↩︎
