At 3pm on Wednesday, 13915 votes had been processed of a possible 30,109, with 12.74 per cent ruled informal.

The count in the election for mayor was better with 5.19 per cent informal.

Cr Kidd said the high number of informal votes was disappointing.

"Extremely so," he said.

"It was an absolutely stupid time of the year to have an election, December, particularly when they'd lifted some of the restrictions and people were getting back to a little bit of normality.

"Secondly, is that they still retained certain COVID restrictions on voting, on how people could electioneer and that sort of stuff, so some of the people didn't have any idea on who some of the candidates were."

Cr Kidd, who did not seek re-election this year, also believed the candidates themselves could have done a better job when it came to letting people know who they were and what they stood for.

"I think the crash of the ivoting didn't help, some people just said well bugger it."

With the exception of Dubbo, which has an average informal percentage over 14 per cent across its five wards, Orange rated higher than Bathurst (10.6 per cent), Cabonne (6.9 per cent) and Cowra (3.9 per cent)

Cr Kidd also believed the ballot paper for the councillor vote was confusing for some voters.

"I think [this was] very critical as it was very confusing ... some people thought they could do some up the top and some down the bottom. I think a lot of votes were informal by people just going one, two, three, four, five, six across the top and then seven, eight, nine, 10 across the bottom.

But it was the timing that Cr Kidd was most critical of.

"I'll bet you my house plus one million dollars that the state or the federal government would never have an election in December."

In the 2017 local government elections, the first to popularly elect the mayor, Orange's informal vote for councillors was 9.1 per cent of almost 25,000 votes. In 2012 it was 7.46 per cent.

Former councillor Neil Jones, who was running for mayor and also campaigned around the booths on Saturday for the Greens ticket said he was frequently quizzed about candidates.

"The scarcity of easily accessible information on the new candidates might have had something to do with [the informal vote]," Mr Jones said.

He said not all groups took the opportunity to upload their how-to-vote information on the NSW Electoral Commission website which may have helped voters make their decision.

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