Curran took out the mayoral vote in a landslide, almost tripling the votes of his nearest competitor - Anne Napoli. Napoli took out second place, with Ms Napoli is second, with 2310 votes compared to the 6177 that secured Curran's mayoral seat.

"I couldn't be happier, I know there would be a shake up with John (Dal Broi) leaving," Mr Curran said in a recent interview with The Area News.

"I feel our positive campaign has paid off. The people of Griffith want some positivity."

While the mayoral race might have drawn to a close, the eleven seats for councillors remain up for grabs. It seems Sutton's ticket is catching up to the runaway success of Doug Curran's trio, with over 1500 above-the-line votes.

Just over 14,169 votes have been counted out of the 16,797 total registered voters in the area. Worryingly, almost 3000 votes have been ruled as invalid or informal, pushing Griffith's informal vote rate to almost 20 per cent.

For the eleven councillor roles up for grabs, Curran alone has secured enough first preference votes to secure two seats, likely now reserved for his running partners Laurie Testoni and Shari Blumer.

The remaining candidates will be relying on second and third preferences however, with most hovering around the halfway point to the 951 needed to secure a seat.

Manjit Lally has soared ahead, second only to Curran for wholesale votes. In an interview with The Area News on December 8, he said "I'm pretty confident we'll get in, pretty much happy with that. Not happy with the informal votes though."

Distribution of preferences is currently scheduled to take place Wednesday, December 22.

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Results from the Griffith Council referendum have also begun to be counted, with initial answers showing a strong desire from the community to reduce the number of councillors.

While the count has only just started, so far almost 80 per cent of responses have been in favour of reducing the number of councillors to nine, rather than the current twelve.

The sway is in favour of continuing the popularly-elected mayor system, with 73 per cent of responses in favour of Griffith residents voting for the mayor themselves.

It seems residents are passionate about the number of councillors, with an impressively low number of informal or donkey votes. Just five informal votes for the question have been counted so far, out of over 1500 total.

The outcome of a Constitutional Referendum is binding, so if the majority of votes continue on the trend, the incoming council will be forced to cut down numbers.

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