THE woman in charge of election logistics for the count in Penrith says council staff had to do five months’ worth of work in six weeks.

Karen Thompson, electoral services manager for Eden Council, was in charge of pulling the 56 staff on the night together and of preparing them for Thursday’s big day.

She said: “It’s probably the most challenging election to get together in the space of time, given the large constituency area we cover, the staff we have had to mobilise and the challenge of people who had booked our constituency stations.

“We’ve had to get other polling stations: we started as soon as we knew [the election had been called]. We started phoning people, phoning polling stations.

“There was no time for bookings.”

The challenge was made even more difficult, she explained, by the interest in the election.

“As it was an election of interest we had a surge in registrations, a surge in postal votes, making sure overseas voters have a postal vote,” Karen continued.

“We had to do something in six weeks that we would have normally done in five months.”

Preparations for a pre-planned election would normally start much earlier.

“If we were leading into a parliamentary General Election we would start preparing in December or early January (before),” she said.

“We would be able to do that in a better timeframe.

“It has been a massive team effort, a lot of people coming together to make sure it happened.”

Despite the challenges, the team were always optimistic.

“We were confident we would get there, no matter how many extra hours, we would get there.

“We would never not let it happen, no matter how much extra work it would take. Collectively we probably worked an extra 500 hours.”