Australians will not be any the wiser about who will emerge victorious from the 2016 federal election for some time.
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The Australian Electoral Commission will not begin counting House of Representatives ballots until Tuesday, after pre-poll ballots for the Senate are counted on Monday.
The commission is taking extra care after it came under fire in the 2013 election when 1370 Western Australian Senate ballot papers went missing, sparking a High Court challenge to the result.
Former federal police commissioner Mick Keelty, investigating the missing ballot papers, criticised the AEC's "lax" and "complacent" practices.
Mr Keelty found there was no apparent policy or process to cross check rubbish and recycling before disposing of ballot papers to ensure they were not accidentally thrown out.
"In the 2013 Senate Election in WA, the AEC failed to meet its own high standards and damaged its reputation with the community and the Parliament," Mr Keelty said.
Phil Diak, a commission spokesman, told the ABC that counting would begin again on Tuesday after all absent, interstate, postal and other declaration votes were reconciled, sorted and packaged. He said these would be dispatched on Monday to the 150 House of Representatives divisions. The process is called the "declaration vote exchange".
"So (a) very sizeable task has to be done carefully before any counting begins," Mr Diak said.
Any counting today will be limited to the small numbers of votes collected by AEC mobile teams.
Mr Diak said the commission had already moved around all the ballots from the 7000 polling booths to more than 80 counting centres.
There were 11.5 million ballots counted for the House of Representatives on Saturday. These were votes cast in polling places on election day and early votes.
Also on Saturday, the commission had counted the first preferences of Senate ballots cast at polling places. It would begin Senate pre-poll ballot counting on Monday and only after this counting was complete would it return to House of Representative ballot counting on Tuesday.
The commission has more than one million postal votes already returned to the AEC so that they can be included in the count on Tuesday. Any postal vote received by the returning officer within 13 days of election are included in the count, a commission statement said.
Mr Diak said some pre-poll votes came from outside the electorate and from around the country, which took time.
"We do need to accomplish all of that before we start processing and starting to tackle the declaration votes from Tuesday over the coming days and weeks," Mr Diak said.
He said, based on previous elections, the "completed count" for the House of Representatives and the Senate took around a month to complete.
"For the House, it all comes down to - the AEC won't declare seats until there's a mathematical impossibility of the leader being overtaken, as it were, in any seat," Mr Diak said.
"So that's often a lot later than when victory is claimed or a seat is conceded. But we've got those weeks ahead of us," he said.
