"It’s looking good for Cathy," said Tony Perrett, a former mathematics teacher who has been number-crunching for Ms McGowan’s team. "We’re so excited." Sophie Mirabella, in danger of losing her seat of Indi. Credit:Mal Fairclough Ms Mirabella earlier had appeared likely to win the count narrowly because postal votes were flowing her way. Ms McGowan was still leading by 771 votes, but with several thousand postal votes still to be counted, her lead was expected to be whittled away, granting Ms Mirabella an eventual win by as little as 100 or 200 votes. However, the last-minute discovery of a little over 1000 votes for Ms McGowan appears likely to give her candidacy a decisive buffer. Mr Perrett calculated Ms McGowan was now likely to emerge the winner by as much as 800 votes.

The AEC officials in Wangaratta began searching for the "lost" votes because of an anomaly between votes cast in Indi for the House of Representatives and the Senate. Cathy McGowan: Pile of pre-poll votes tips scales in favour of the Independent. Credit:Justin McManus The small bonanza for Ms McGowan appeared when a box containing counted votes was found to have been wrongly marked. The box was marked as containing 1115 votes for Ms McGowan. It actually contained 2118. An AEC spokesman said scrutineers realised there was a "clear difference" in the number of first-preference votes for Ms McGowan in the House of Representatives count and the Senate count during a check of the votes. The votes had been counted and scrutinised, he said, but had not yet been added to the total vote count.

"Across all the 11.3 million or so votes counted, coming back to counting centres, the reason we do all the checking and the fresh runs of all the ballots again is to pick up anything that may be like this and to be absolutely sure that everything's reconciled. So this is an example of where we found something." The spokesman revealed 42 scrutineers were at the Wangaratta counting centre. "Many votes are being challenged, mostly from one side," he said. "It’s slow going." He said: "After election night every polling place returns its votes to the divisional counting centre for every electorate. We undertake further scrutiny and further checking of all the votes and all the numbers around it; we do that for every vote. "In this instance we found a discrepancy in what were scrutineered and already counted votes ... it's more the transcription error and getting it into our system. It's basically an accounting issue." Ms McGowan, who was lunching with three of her eight sisters in a Beechworth bakery, flushed and became emotional upon discovery of the votes. For the first time, she said, it seemed the dream of winning the seat of Indi might come true.

"I'm happy," she said. "It's possible isn't it?" She expected there would be a recount. As she gathered her thoughts, her media advisor Campbell Klose, 25, who has driven the social media campaign to sell Ms McGowan as a fresh start for an electorate that has been all but owned by conservatives since federation, said: "It's been such a rollercoaster ... but if we have these extra 1000 votes, it may well get us across the line." Ms Mirabella, who is assured of a cabinet post in the Abbott ministry if she manages to return to Parliament, is now reliant only on a strong postal vote to save her. Ms McGowan has won all booths in the larger cities of Wodonga and Wangaratta, swept Beechworth and took the majority of the vote in Benalla. However, Ms Mirabella retained strong support in most smaller towns and rural areas.

While postal votes usually favour the incumbent, close observers point out that most of these votes would have been cast before Ms Mirabella and her team, recognising they were in serious trouble as the campaign progressed, mounted a final desperate effort to try to persuade voters not to back an independent. Loading However, Ms Mirabella would earlier have sent the vast majority of postal vote applications to constituents, each with a plea attached to cast their vote for her.