UK General Election 4th July – are you registered to vote? NON POLITICAL POST

[BA Flyer IHG Stayer]

Re the GLA / London Mayor

Electronic counting was used because it was felt it would take too long to do it manually as the Mayor was elected via supplementary vote. And several hundred thousands of ballot papers would need further sorting once the top two candidates across London were known

For 2024 the law was changed (for all elected Mayors and Police & Crime Commissioners) to first past the post so there was really no need for an electronic count. The only count I think that is still extant in the UK is for Scottish local government elections.

Counting of votes is actually a two stage process

The first is verification where the ballot papers in an individial box are counted to make sure they match the presiding officers records. There is no sorting of papers into piles of individual candidates.

The second is the actual count which is sorting and counting but a single box isn’t counted alone they have to be mixed with another one and postal votes.

With the electronoic GLA count humans loaded the papers from each box into the counters and ran them through the machines which could read each paper even if it was upside down or back to front. There was no separate sorting of papers before that into the separte elements of the election. Any papers that couldn’t be read would be spat out for human intervention.
Verification and counting took place as a single process but it couldn’t be closed off for that box until any discrepencies were sorted. When that was done that box count was closed and the results sent to a central counter. The counter on that machine would be reset and another box pocessed.

For the manual count this year the verification took place on the Friday where each box was again dealt with individually and the three different ballot papers separated and counted and matched against the presiding officers records. The sorting and counting to individual candidates count took place on the Saturday. All told there were close on 7.5 million separate ballor papers to count.

Because our elections here are uncomplicated when it comes to voting and counting votes – usually we only elect to one body per election – it’s marginal at best as to whether electronic counting is more effieient or cheaper. You still need people to load the machines and unfold folded papers etc. in 2019 32 million votes were counted by hand.