By Ethan Benedicto
Dillwynia Ward on the eastern border of the City of Casey has elected Anthony Walter as its councillor.
The ward itself has seen its fair share of drama in the last few weeks leading up to the race’s finale, with candidates Jaz Masuta and Gurpreet Gill appearing on A Current Affair and in The Age.
The elected councillor, Anthony Walter, has been overseas for holidays, having missed the official councillor announcements as well as the first few weeks of induction; he is set to return early in December.
Despite his absence, Walter said, “I’m very honoured and excited to be one of the councillors for this refresh of the council”.
“One of my first areas to address will be road and public space maintenance, as there has been too much neglect of these public areas.”
As for the numbers, Walter took an early commanding lead with the first preferences, racking up 3233 votes, and while others sought to catch up, he was eventually bolstered by Bissell’s preferences later in the rounds to secure the win.
At 714 votes behind, Joe Pang sat at second with 2519, David Bissell at third with 1974 and Gurpreet Gill at fourth with 1836 to begin the race.
The first transfer of ballot papers from Champika Hewa Maddumage saw an even distribution of second preferences, except for Anthony Dissanayake who had 592 votes, compared to Gill who only had 113 in second, and Walter who had 81.
At this stage, the progressive total still had Walter in the lead and Pang in second, with Dissanayake now taking the lead from Gill to gain fourth place.
The second round of transfers saw an almost even split of second preferences from Jaz Masuta to Baljinder Dhaliwal with the most at 448, and Pang at second with 425.
Gill had the third-most votes from Mastua with 284, and Walter lagged behind this stage with only 163 preferences.
Standings began to shift after the third round, with Dhaliwal’s papers heavily favouring Gill with 985 second preference votes.
The other candidates saw an even split, with Pang gaining 352, Walter with 285 and Dissanayake with 215.
Despite retaining the least amount of second preference votes from eliminated candidates, Walter still held the lead after the third round at 3762.
However, Pang was slowly gaining the lead with 3375 and Gill now in the rearview with 3218.
Dissanayake at this stage had fallen through with a total of 2257 votes, whose papers showed the more even spread of votes to the remaining candidates.
Pang was favoured with the most second preferences from Dissanayake with 631, though Walter was just behind with 626 and Gill gaining traction with 621.
Bissell, unfortunately, lucked out this round with only 379 second preference votes and finished with a total of 2675.
After the distribution of Dissanayake’s papers, the total still had Walter leading with 4388, Pang at second with 4006 and Gill at third with 3839.
What was set to be a close race was immediately shut down on the fifth round, after Bissell’s papers heavily favoured Walter with a total of 1739 second preferences.
In comparison, Pang, while receiving the second-most, only retained 664 votes, 1075 less than Walter.
Gill was the last to be eliminated, only receiving 272 votes in the previous rounds, he finished with a total of 4111 votes.
From his papers, the stone was set; Walter received 2122 second preferences from Gill and Pang received 1989.
Walter finished with a total of 8249 votes and Pang finished with 6659.
While the mayor has already been announced, Walter had no plans on vying for the position, with a full dedication to balancing his role at Bunnings and his contributions as a councillor.
