The Electoral Commission has a new consultation paper out, returning to an old issue: when should election counts be held?
As the paper says:
The key issue is that many Returning Officers have considered that increasingly complex election counts would be better conducted the morning after the close of poll when staff are fresh and less likely to make mistakes, while governments, political parties and candidates have often pressed for counts in major elections to take place immediately after the close of polls. This has led to controversies in the public domain ahead of major elections.
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7 Comments
Vote counting in Canada (and Australia) begins as soon as the polls close (staggered times across the country given the different time zones). The big difference is that in Canada (and AUS), we don’t provide final counts on election nights. The emphasis in the UK is on declaring final results, which is why the vote counting takes so much time. In Canada, provisional results are released on the night of the vote, not final results. Within a few days of those published results, returning officers are required to validate the counts submitted from the individual polls. These validated results are made public and published on the Elections Canada website as they become available. Validations are usually completed the same day that they start. The Elections Act allows validations to be delayed up to three weeks, if necessary, to allow all ballot boxes to be delivered to the returning officer. Once a validation is completed, the Act requires the returning officer to wait seven days to formally declare the elected winner. This is to provide an opportunity for a judicial recount to be held where required. On the seventh day following the validation of results (or, if a judicial recount was held, on its completion), the returning officer declares the winner and returns the writ of election to the Chief Electoral Officer. Works fine here – maybe the issue in the UK isn’t when to start counting, but why the need to provide FINAL results right away?
It should be left to returning officers to decide. There has always been a tradition of differing timetables for different constituencies in the UK. To those who like the party atmosphere of the morning after election day I say, if you want a party, go to a party, not a serious election count.
One of the things that returning officers have to consider is the possibility of a close result and recounts.
And to those who say that getting the whole thing done and dusted on the night is traditional I say “codswallop”. Even since the war, we’ve had to wait until midday the next day for a precise idea of he result. And if you go back to Gladstone’s time, the whole thing took a week!
Next day. Almost always except for council by-elections and other “easy” counts.
Tony Greaves
I believe the last UK General Election which took a really long time was 1945, when the votes of service people scattered across the globe had to counted. In the UK today, non first-past the post counts (Greater London, Northern Ireland…) often don’t start until he next day, and in Euro elections, verification is done after close of polls, but actual counts by party happen on Sunday evening, after polls are closed throughout Europe.
So I think Tony Greaves is right. By all means count the simple council by-elections on Thursday night. Other elections should be planned for more realistically, to avoid the sort of strain we had in a London Borough in 2010. The General Election count was completed by 3 a.m, but the council election count started then had to be suspended twice, with completion of the last two wards on Monday afternoon. (The complexion of the council was clear on Friday afternoon.)
I think this discussion is partially a hangover from a time when election counts were regarded as high security events. For example party count observers had to sign security declarations and nobody could leave the count room until the count was over and a figure declared. If people needed to go to the loos they each had to have a police escort. This to prevent news of the count progress leaking out from observers sneaking off to a phone. I understand that this was regarded as a safeguard against ‘precinct holding’ as allegedly occurred in US elections ( holding back counting of some ballot boxes until the general shape of a count became clear so that the unscrupulous could decide how many votes were needed to steal the election). This security was inspired by the telephone revolution which allowed rapid communication between constituencies.
The much more relaxed framework of todays counts only came in during the 1980’s as I remember…
While we are about it, should we abandon the practice of shuffling the papers so that it is impossible to tell from which ballot box they came?
In Lancaster in the early 1980’s the practice was to count the papers per box and fill in the totals for each candidate on a form for each box. This was taped to the side of the box and agents strolled round noting down the figures. I was amazed to find that my skills in cout watch tallying were unknown amongst Lancaster Liberals at that time.
Do they still do this up there?
If we adopted the then-Lancaster practice we could have published figures of votes per polling place… would that be desirable?
OT – but how about having the voting at the weekend – middle of the week days are when working people are least likely to bother to vote.
Ooops – sorry I forgot, that’s why the elite’s have them on Tuesdays – to discourage working people from voting – Democracy in Britain – what a perverse joke.