And another thing…

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It has always amazed me that we persist in closing schools on a Thursday to allow them to be used as polling stations. As if there isn’t enough time pressure on teachers to deliver the curriculum. What’s wrong with having voting on Saturdays and Sundays, then counting the votes on Monday morning? It might also increase turnout.

Apparently, the British tradition of voting on a Thursday is based on the fact that working men would get paid on Friday and then proceed to spend it all on booze over the weekend. Thursday voting increased the chances of voters being sober when they made their mark on the ballot paper.

On second thoughts …

Agree. I can’t see any reason for delaying the counting of votes.

It is just one more opportunity for a ballot box to go missing or any other wheeze for interfering with a ballot.

The reason given is absolutely ridiculous. If they don’t want a late night then fine, don’t volunteer to be a counter.

Having stood a couple of times as a Parliamentary Candidate and – on one occasion – waiting for votes to be counted until 4.45am, I’m all in favour of a delay. Getting people to work through the night counting votes is a really stupid idea. They get tired and make mistakes.

Good to see you are a Labour Luddite Tom.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

Which wag was it who dubbed politics as show business for ugly people?!

Much as I enjoy PMQs and election night programmes, our politics would be better off without either of these bits of televised theatre.

I agree with you Tom. Perhaps an all-party parliamentary group to save election night should be considered?

I agree with Tom . . . Again!

(falls over in amazement)

But not for any ‘heartache’ caused to the prospective candidates . . .

Any delay between the last vote being cast and the votes being counted simply allows an opportunity for vote ‘rigging’ and ’stuffing’ of ballot boxes.

It happened in the Birmingham Local Elections and it is highly likely that it had a hand in Labour winning in Glenrothes, against all the polls expectations, where the ‘postal vote’ went up to 9,000+ from a previous amount of just less than 3,000.

Did six thousand people really decide that they wanted a postal vote this time round?

And then when the SNP wanted to check the paperwork, which was being held in the Labour controlled council offices . . . surprise, surprise! . . . they had all gone missing and haven’t been found to this day.

Delay in counting just plays into the hands of crooked party officials.
I would be interested to know how many of these councils / councillors are Labour.

At first I agreed with you. It’s one of those great nights as rare as World Cup finals and has to be savoured and relished. If you go to bed before 4.0am, you’re a sissy. You want to surround yourself with snacks and have the kettle permanently on the boil and listen to the various counts and reports….

Then I thought, nah, just tell me if the proles have voted red or blue and either way I’ll go to bed and sob uncontrollably.

thereby killing any sense of excitement that traditionally surrounds the most important night in the political calendar.

Does that mean you’re looking forward to election night next year?

I agree with you though, I love the spectacle of election night, plus, surely, any delay in a result until late on Friday will significantly affect the financial markets, due to uncertainty?

Silent Hunter: “Glenrothes, … where the ‘postal vote’ went up to 9,000+ from a previous amount of just less than 3,000.”

I take it you’ve never been involved in a by-election before, Silent? As any SNP activist will tell you, postal votes massively increase in comparison with the previous general election. It happened in Glasgow East,Norwich North, Crewe, Glenrothes, and will I’m sure happen in Glasgow North East.

“And then when the SNP wanted to check the paperwork, which was being held in the Labour controlled council offices . . . surprise, surprise! . . . they had all gone missing and haven’t been found to this day.”

Dearie me, Silent. I’ll assume that was a mistake, not a deliberate smear – the SNP won control of the local council from Labour the previous year.

On the basis of being ’seen to be fair’ then votes need to be counted as quickly as possible.

Weekend voting for me. Increased availability of voters and premises would surely make for a higher turnout. Having a count throughout Saturday night would make great TV too.

This is sentamentalism.

Let’s have the count while everyone is awake rather than activists and candidates having been up since 5am. Counters too probably having had a busy day at work.

Counts can get farcical in recount situations when counters are so tired that they’re more likely to make mistakes than when they started.

And from a campaigning pov, much easier to get activists and candidates to knock people up right up till close of polls when they’re not worried about missing the start of the count.

If Tom’s libertarian friends are so worried about us Labour types stuffing the ballot box, perhaps we should install CCTV cameras to prevent anyone going anywhere near the boxes.

Personally I’d have early voting, with mobile vans visiting low-turnout polling districts, and all-weekend voting in all PDs 7am-10pm with Thursdays too for a few elections while the new system was tested.

“no candidate wants to be forced to wait an extra excruciating number of hours before finding out his fate.”

“can you imagine how dull it would be if, when the polls closed at ten, David Dimbleby, instead of giving us an exit poll result, told us what the precise actual result of the general election was?”

Double think?

Having our count being cancelled in 2007 (Na H-eileanan an Iar) due to a dodgy helicopter I totally agree with this. It meant another 10 hours of agony in which no one slept and all parties became irritable. The electronic voting kills any atmosphere and makes it harder for candidates to prepare their emotions when it is impossible to know how the vote is going. Also coming home after the count to watch the rest of the election night is all part of the fun and games, peaks and troughs , highs and lows.

Save Election Night!

Oddly, I agree on the computerised counting. I see no technical reason why we shouldn’t be looking at internet voting / a computer count on election night, and we wouldn’t half keep our environmental friends happy by not cutting down all those trees to make millions of ballot papers, many of which go unused, but the idea of seeing a clock ticking down until 10pm then instantly announcing the winner is horribly depressing (if you support the party that wins you want to savour the gains as they come in throughout the night – If you support the parties that don’t win then you don’t want to be told instantly, much like you wouldn’t like it if someone blurted out that your parents had just died).

There are still many things in this world worth savouring – election night is one of them.

While I am one of those who does watch election night results. It is time to change.

The results are not meant to be a television spectacle for the Dimbleby clan, they have a far more damaging impact.

I agree with results coming out as quickly as possible, but not for the sake of poor old candidates in suspense. Everyone else having attended a job interview has to wait for the result, so this is not something unique to politicians.

The idea of the results announced at 10pm would be well received.

What served generations does not necessarily make for value.

Tom: “General election only happen every four or five years. Is it really too much to ask that counts actually take place in the same way they’ve been carried out for generations?”

And let’s bar women from elections too.

Seriously, if Pop Idol can count their votes before the nippers go to bed then surely the UK Gov can manage it too.

The main problem is that the polls don’t close until 10pm.
Hardly anyone votes in the last few hours.
Close them earlier and we will have the first results at around 10 and know the overall picture by midnight.

I think we should announce the result now.

Conservative gains everywhere.

Labour losing everywhere.

UKIP beating the Lib Dems.

BNP nowhere.

Conservatives elected.

The election proper can then just fill in the minor details.

Hamish: it’d be lovely if, when the polls close we could get the results in, within an hour or so.

But electronic voting is flawed. You only have to visit the US to see that, with the ludicrous Diebold machines, with their closed-surce model and trivial-to-exploit weaknesses.. Hell, even the farce of an election we had in 2007, with 100,000 votes getting annulled; sure a lot of that was the stupid layout and trying out two different systems on the one night (which thankfully will not be repeated). But it was also added to by the useless counting machines.
No, counting should be done by hand, as soon as possible. If you want to at-the-same-time also run the votes through a counting machine, fine. But you can’t announce until every last ballot paper has gone through a pair of human hands, been read by a pair of human eyes, and the result duly counted.
Apart from the fact democracy is too important to leave to a possibly duff counting machine, Tom is right on this, a sense of drama helps with the idea that people should vote, do their bit for the democracy. it’s not like we have any other civic duties we ask everyone to partake in, so asking everyone to vote, then a ton of good people to stay up as long as is needed to get the votes counted, its’s not much to ask over 4 or 5 years.

@Math Campbell

“democracy is too important to leave to a possibly duff counting machine”

What makes a human perfect though? They are just as prone to mistakes as computers.

I agree about the closed-source software though. To have an election the software needs to be open-source for all to see.

An APOLOGY to TOM HARRIS !

Dear Tom,

I unreservedly withdraw the comment I made on my earlier comment regarding the Labour Council ‘losing’ the electoral Register – it was the Fife District Court who ‘lost’ them.

Please accept my apologies for this incorrect assertion on my part Tom – The register was not in Labour hands when it went missing.

However, it DID go missing, therefore depriving us of any chance to see if the additional 6,000 postal votes were . . . how shall I put this . . . “fiddled” . . . in any way.

I’m not sure I can really see the logic in stating that the postal vote always goes up? I would have thought that postal voting is far easier to corrupt than voting in person and that it should be only for those who really can’t make it to the polling station.

I note that you don’t mention the Birmingham Labour activists caught stuffing ballot boxes in a warehouse at the dead of night, by the boys in blue.

But fair do’s . . . If I am wrong, then I’m happy to admit it and you were right and I was wrong . . . this time.

At least you’re still talking to me.

Love you man!

Don’t let Stewart Cowan hear you say that…

Which bit?

The ’still talking’ bit or the ‘love you man’ bit.

Election night is a wonderful spectacle and something I have stayed up for for the last 25 years or so.

My main opposition to staggering the result is not sentimental, it is practical. The ballot papers are counted under the eyes of the nation. I don’t trust interested parties to try and interfere with the ballot boxes if they are left overnight. Staggering the results smacks of Zimbabwe to me.

I’m sure Silent meant ‘love’ as in brotherly love – a beautiful and godly thing.

Even more fun is an election count with STV voting……

Counting as soon as possibel reduces the chance for fraud. Also, we must never have electronic only voting – there must alwasy be a paper back up of some kind, even if things are counted by machine. That way, the result can always be verified by any person who is unhappy with the result for some reason.

I completely agree, and have joined the Facebook group. There’s a lot of bleating goes on nowadays about low election turnouts, the need to “engage” voters and so on – yet many of the same people want to make politics miles duller by bringing in PR, and this sort of nonsense.

I’m against delaying counting for a number of reasons. First, it provides an opportunity for fraudsters that we could well do without. Second, it would makes things duller as everyone has said.

Third, though, and most crucially – there’s a constitutional argument against delay. The advantage of immediate counting is that if there’s a change of government, this is known as soon as it’s sensible to know it (I’m against risky Bush v Gore style e-voting), and the new government is in office in the morning. If voting is delayed, we have an entirely unnecessary morning, at least, probably a whole Friday, without Parliament and under an illegitimate government which has lost the confidence of the people. Not on.

I also think there’s a good argument for Thursdays as election day (though Friday might be ideal). First, its being a working day may encourage turnout: people are out and about, up in the morning and going places purposefully without so many competing attractions of shopping, going away for dirty weekends and so on. Second, an incoming government has the weekend to get its ducks in a row before business resumes properly on Monday.

But back to the counting issue. For some years, various sports have gone in for a “trendy”, “modern” trophy ceremony in which the winners have, seemingly after hours of waiting around, TV interviews and so forth, mounted a big podium in the middle of the pitch and then hung around yet more, goofing, gurning and shaking lots of business-type blokes’ hands while girls with sashes have stood sexistly around until the players have linked arms and started jumping up and down to relieve the boredom and finally some dignitary has lifted up the cup in a wet, limp and topply way before handing it over while fireworks and tickertape went off. Rubbish. That’s delayed counting, that is.

But when Wires won the Challenge Cup the other week against their Yorkshire foe (HOORAY! Not before time, etc., etc.), Adrian “Mozzer” Morley mounted the Wembley steps in heroic exhaustion, retro-fashion, ahead of his men to claim the prize. He took the Cup from the Royal box, felt its weight (and proper old-fashioned Victorian Cup it is, not some symbolic sculpted thing in crystal dreamt up by a fancy designer) and turned triumphantly to present it to the crowd, old-style, the spoils of a classic sporting combat. Well, he held it up jointly with Lee Briers. Anyway, it was much more satisfying than that tickertape podium business, and much more worth waiting 35 years for. Sometimes the old ways is best.

“note that you don’t mention the Birmingham Labour activists caught stuffing ballot boxes in a warehouse at the dead of night, by the boys in blue.”

Note you don’t mention this either –
http://tinyurl.com/d3jjej

The report begins: A former Tory candidate and five others were jailed on Friday for using ‘ghost’ voters to win a local council ballot….

[...] Isaby, Harris and Pickles just like the drama.  The rest of us just want the result, the faster the [...]

Congratulations for this stand about election night, Tom.

I certainly don’t agree with the way Silent Night put his point. But he is nevertheless right that the most fundamental objection to delayed counting of the votes is that it increases the possibility of meddling with the ballot papers, however unlikely that may be in the UK. There must not only be no such possibility, but the candidates must be able to verify that there is no such possibility.

Recent events in overseas elections have made the dangers of delayed counting all too clear.

It should be said that a much more serious problem than counting during the day on the Friday is that of postal voting. The integrity of postal ballots is very difficult indeed to ensure. In addition, it is effectively impossible to guarantee the secrecy of a postal ballot, and by definition that of a proxy vote. The secrecy of the ballot is essential to democracy, and without checking I suspect the UK is committed to the secret ballot by international law (if it isn’t, it should be). When up to 40% of the votes are cast by post (e.g. in Newcastle), the election simply isn’t secret.

Sadly, there HAVE recently been a number of serious cases, involving different political parties, where the law courts have convicted following abuse of postal votes.

I used to be a Labour Party member in a very rural seat. People still remembered when agricultural labourers did not dare admit to voting Labour for fear of being thrown out of their tied cottages. I am sure some of the farmers would have wished to look at their workers’postal votes. How much Labour has forgotten!

William Gladstone designed voting procedures excellently, in the nineteenth century, albeit nightime counting in many rural seats was impossible before motor transport. Until recent changes in the law, there were few serious problems with elections for a century, except in Northern Ireland where the register was inaccurate, another very serious problem which has recently arisen elsewhere in the UK. We ought to go right back to Gladstone’s arrangements, but with Thursday night counting.

P.S. Tom West is right about the need for paper ballots. I used to work in IT and I appreciate the importance of paper audit trails. And again, be warned by experience abroad.

[...] count from the traditional Thursday night slot to Friday daytime.  This has prompted a cross party campaign to ‘Save Election [...]