Electoral Commission of South Australia
South Australian election commission
The Electoral Commission SA is an independent office which forms part of the Government of South Australia, and which conducts parliamentary state elections every four years.
History
In 1907 the then State Electoral Department was established to administer all South Australian parliamentary elections. It was renamed to State Electoral Office in 1993, and to Electoral Commission SA in 2009. Prior to this, elections in South Australia were administered by a "Returning Officer for the Province", an office which had been held by William Boothby from his appointment in 1854 until his death in 1903. George Hamilton Ayliffe, a long standing public servant, filled the role in the 1905 and 1906 elections and Charles Llandaff Mathews was the first state returning officer appointed under the State Electoral Department.
More than 120 parliamentary elections, by-elections and referendums have been conducted by this Office. The State Electoral Commissioner was first empowered to conduct miscellaneous elections in 1980, and later in 1990 the Attorney-General gave approval for the Commissioner to be appointed returning officer for local government elections when requested. In 1999 the Electoral Commissioner was appointed returning officer for all local government elections.
The Commission was the first electoral administration in the world to use computer technology to produce an electoral roll, the first prototype roll scanner, and the development and use of cardboard ballot boxes and voting compartments.
Mick Sherry was appointed commissioner in 2017; he took over from Kay Mousley, who was the first woman in the role.
The public source identifies “Electoral Commission of South Australia” as south Australian election commission. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Electoral, Commission and South.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5354985. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1907, 1993, 2009 and 1854.
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This entry incorporates text from “Electoral Commission of South Australia” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.