I was one of the guest observers at the election count on the evening of 4 July 2024 and it was interesting seeing the process in action in detail.
Process
The room—in this case the main hall of the Town Hall, with its plaster mouldings and columnades down the sides—is divided in to an inner secure area where the counters and officials are, and a restricted area around the sides where the observers can go. Observers and counters face each other accross a double row of tables. There were eight teams of four counters.
Verification
Starting around 10:30 p.m., verification is the process where the ballots are pulled out of the heap dumped out of a ballot box, spread out flat to the observers to see, and formed in to neat piles. The initial count is to verify that there are as many ballots in the heap as votes were recorded as cast by the polling-station officials during the day. This was done by paper-clipping them in bundles of ten, which were then recounted by a different person, and then rubber-banding the bundles in stacks of 100, which were recounted as well.
While they are doing this the party agents make an informal tally of the votes: this is useful information for party planners, as it gives the results broken down by ballot box, and so by smaller geographical areas than the final vote will be.
Sorting
Once the total number of votes is agreed they start sorting ballots in to plastic in-trays labelled with the surnames of candidates. This is again done with different teams working in parallel on different batches of ballots. In our case, Oxford East being a safe Labour constituency, the outcome is pretty obvious at this stage just from the physical size of the stacks of paper.
Party agents continue watching them like hawks, the main objective in this stage being to spot one of your candidate’s votes being erroneously added to the wrong pile. I did—just once—have to interrupt and say a paper had gone to the wrong pile.
The main entertainment, apart from forming preferences for different counters’ styles of counting, is the unclear ballots. Occasionally this is just a big scribble saying they are all useless, several were protests at not being able to vote for Nigel Farage personally. They are all set aside for officers to look at and decide if they are intended to be real votes after all, and are gone through with candidates and agents at a little meeting held in the entrance to the secure enclave.
Once sorted, the trays are pinned in tens and stacked in hundreds as before.
Totals are noted on official documents, and added up. After a long period where the teams are mostly sitting around waiting for the last few teams to finish up, and then for the officials to agree their totals. Then, at last (4:10 in the morning, more or less), the announcement and acceptance speech from the winner.
Then, for me, cycling home in the predawn twilight.
Consequences
As a computer programmer I am a big fan of in-person voting with paper ballots versus some form of electronic voting. The advantage of paper in boxes is people can understand how to convey them from place to place securely, and it does not take specialized knowledge to understand what attempted voting fraud would look like. My bicycle broke on the morning of the election, and a colleague joked that this might be voter suppression—but that just goes to show how hard it would be to affect the election that way: you’d need to break hundreds or thousands of bicycles in dozens of constituencies to make real difference to the outcome.
This is important because the thing that matters most is the confidence in the outcome: even people who did not vote for candidates of the winning party must be content to accept the result, and have hope for doing better next time. I think the careful public ritual of collecting ballots, sorting and counting them helps bring that confidence. It also appeals to my sense of people’s votes deserving of being treated with a certain ceremony.
The other side to this is that this overnight result works because elections are conducted using the simplest kind of voting: first-past-the-post for winner-takes-all constituencies. Britain has on occasion used Supplementary Vote, a limited form of instant run-off counting, but anything more sophisticated (like STV) could not be counted in one sitting as it is at present. That’s not an overwhelming argument against electoral reform, but must be considered in the design for any proposed new system.