What happens at a count on election night?

Posted by Dr Hannah Bunting

What happens at a count on election night?
By Adam Gray

Ever watched an election night programme when they go to their reporter at the count, repeatedly checking-in to see when the results will be known? What takes them so long? Perhaps you’ve also seen the election staff in, say, Sunderland, rushing in with the sealed ballot boxes full of votes. Where do they go? How is your vote safeguarded after you’ve dropped it in the ballot box? What involvement, if any, do the political parties have in the process?

Votes aren’t just tipped out and then counted. There are two main stages to every count, the verification and the counting, but up to seven stages depending on the situation.

1. Verification

The first stage is the verification. This is to check that the number of ballots in the box matches the number of voters the staff in the polling station say were issued with a ballot. It ensures someone hasn’t added extra fraudulent votes, and that every vote cast is counted.

At verification the counting staff have the boxes tipped out in front of them and their sole purpose is to count how many ballots there are – not who they’re cast for. They’re counted into bundles, typically of fifty votes, and then stacked up ready to be counted.

2. Sampling

Verification is also when you might catch glimpses on TV of party activists with clipboards standing over the counting tables and writing stuff down. They are “sampling” the ballots they can see. Even though the votes are just being unfolded and bundled, the Xs are visible and the activists will be tallying up how many each party has got.

Each ballot box has a number which relates to a polling district – a sub-division of the council ward you live in. The parties know where each ballot box comes from, which ward and even which streets or blocks within that ward. After, say, 50 to 100 ballots have been “sampled” by the volunteer, their tally is entered into a spreadsheet designed to extrapolate the samples to the expected voter turnout.

So, before a single vote has been counted, the parties will know what the result is likely to be. On an election night programme, this is how the reporter can say “we’ve spoken to this or that party and they’re quietly confident…” They’re actually more than confident: they know whether they’ve won, but they can’t say so before the result is declared.

If the samples say a ward is close parties will move their most capable, alert activists around when the formal count begins.

3. Scrutineers

The role of the party volunteers now changes. They become scrutineers instead of samplers. When the count starts, they won’t pay any attention to the pile of votes for their own party – they’ll be looking at the opposition piles to make sure none of their votes are accidentally put in the wrong piles.

All the postal votes that have been returned to the town hall before 10pm when polls close, and any dropped in to polling stations on the day get added to the mix now. They’ll have been verified earlier.

4. Counting the votes

Those random bundles of fifty are mixed up and re-sorted into piles for each party. In local elections where there may be two or three councillors to elect in one go, votes are sorted into “blocks” – that is where the voter has cast all their votes for candidates of the same party, or “splits” – where they’ve voted for different parties or not cast all their votes.

The piles of “blocks” for any of the parties standing are again bundled into fifties and double checked to make sure they are all blocks, that is that no split votes slipped in. They’ll typically get a colour band round them denoting which party they are for.

Finally, the splits need to be counted. There are different ways of counting splits but usually they involve one counter calling out who the votes have been cast for (or not cast), and another marking that name off on a chart. Then they add each individual candidate’s votes to the party blocks, and that’s essentially the result ready to be declared.

5. Disputed ballots

If a voter has just dropped a blank ballot paper into the box, voted for more candidates than permitted, not filled in the vote clearly or identified who they are on their paper, these will be set aside. All these “disputed” votes are gone through at the end with the party election agents and “adjudicated”. It’s usually clear if a disputed ballot can be counted or rejected: rows may only happen if that potentially rejected vote could change the result.

6. Recount?

An election can, of course, be very close. Reform won the Runcorn and Helsby by-election last year by just seven votes. If a result is that tight, the election agent (the party official in charge of all aspects of the campaign) can ask for a recount.

A recount does not always mean every vote being counted from scratch again. It can mean that the bundles are just carefully rechecked to ensure that all fifty ballots have been cast for the party the label says they have been. That’s much quicker than a full recount. Only if the bundle recount has produced a materially different result from the first count might a full recount of the whole ward be ordered, and even then they might attempt another bundle count to see if the third tally aligns with the second. Full recounts are rare.

7. Declaration

The council ‘returning officer’ decides whether to recount or declare the result. A party that is unhappy with that decision can apply to the High Court in subsequent days, depending on how important the outcome is and whether there is enough justification to incur the cost of going to court.

Anyhow, let’s assume the result is clear. Time to gather all the candidates on the stage and for the official result to be read out. Then we can all go to bed. Or, in our case, watch the rest of the results come in.