Former federal police chief Mick Keelty has described the handling of the West Australian Senate election recount as a "disaster".
Parliament's electoral matters committee is investigating how 1370 ballots went missing in a recount of the 2013 Senate election in WA and measures to ensure it does not happen again.
The loss has resulted in a court-ordered re-run of the WA Senate election on April 5, which could affect the Abbott government's delivery of key election promises.
Mr Keelty was hired to find out what went wrong, but was unable to put his finger on one specific fault or criminality.
"This was a disaster," he told the committee in Canberra on Wednesday.
The debacle claimed the resignations of Australian electoral commissioner Ed Killesteyn and WA electoral officer Peter Kramer.
Mr Keelty said he was glad Mr Kramer had gone.
"There was poor leadership," he said.
The transport contract for moving ballot boxes had expired two months before the election and pallets with boxes of ballot papers were found, Russian doll-style, near rubbish bins.
"As boxes were used and reused and packed and repacked, they had (ballots from) different polling stations in them and different parties," Mr Keelty said.
He could not conclude whether the missing ballot papers were "accidentally thrown out with the rubbish" or stolen by criminals.
"The system was so parlous you could not come to that (criminal) conclusion," he said.
"You can't rule it out and you can't rule it in."
Mr Keelty dismissed a suggestion the federal police investigate, saying any evidence was likely to have been destroyed.
He said the solution lay in treating every ballot paper as "sacrosanct" and accounting for them through the barcoding of boxes so they could be tracked.
The electoral commission also had a culture that favoured the House of Representatives count because it was seen as more urgent and important than the Senate count.
"If nothing else, the AEC has learnt a big lesson out of the mistake that happened here."
Acting electoral commissioner Tom Rogers will appear before the committee next week to talk about improvements for the election re-run.
