General Election 2024

the write-up... I've slept 2h49m :joy: but at least I had the sense to book the day off work.

21:30

arrive at the counting venue, in my case the Great Hall of Alexandra Palace in North London, it's arranged as a huge space with trestle tables in a rectangle covering the hall, Count Staff are allow in the middle but no-one else is, Counters wear pink T-shirts, Count Managers were black, all are identified by neck bands and there is security everywhere. in the centre there is a control table where the Returning Officer (RO) has a desk where his staff are double checking everything. no electronic devices are allowed to be used here, so no photos of this.
first up is verification of postal votes

postal votes are already being opened and verified. Verification is the process of confirming that there are as many ballot papers as there were postal votes counted... the RO knows how many postal votes were delivered as the Royal Mail gives them a number, all envelopes are opened, stacked face up, counted into batches of 10, paper clipped, and then set aside. When it's all counted, the Count Managers tell the RO what they have... if it matches then all is good, if it does not match then they will count everything twice over, final count is majority wins. in a single count, a Count Staff will actually count each batch of 10 twice, at different corners of the batch, so that if the ballot papers have stuck together in one place then they haven't in the other.

22:00

polls have closed, everyone is waiting

22:15

first ballot box arrives, the box is actually a Deliveroo style bag, but zipped closed and sealed with plastic number seals at the Polling Station. the Polling Station have counted everyone who voted during the day and deliver along with the box a tally of how many ballots to expect within a ballot box, the ballot box is numbered on the outside to identify which polling station sent it, the safety seals, polling station number, and ballot count all must match.

first verification is whether the ballot boxes are untampered, if this is passed then the ballots are poured out onto the trestle tables. the staff are not sorting votes at this point, just arranging them face up to be counted into batches of 10... they're only seeking to quickly verify that the number of votes in the ballot box matches the box tally. If the number does not match what the RO has on their form... recount another 2 times. I saw 1 box not match and it's clear that the Count Staff have no idea whether they're +5, -2, etc... all they're told is "this does not match, recount"... that box was counted 5 times, with the number coming out the same 4 times (the first 2 did not, forcing more counts).

this is also the time when each party has their Counting Agent, I was a volunteer for the Green Party — despite not being a member, I just make a lot of donations to random things as part of having a secular tithe where I donate at least 10% of take-home salary, and this included the Greens, and suddenly they offered me the chance to be their paper candidate, which I politely declined, and then they sought volunteers to be a Counting Agent, which I accepted as I wanted to see how this bit of democracy works.

in the UK we have 1 ballot box per 1.5K people on average as there is 1 polling station per 1.5K people... meaning this is the most granular that you can get data.

the job of a Counting Agent, from the Party perspective, is therefore to stand in front of a batch of 4 trestle tables where 8 people are going to verify the number of votes from a single polling station, and to record the box number, i.e. TT57, and then by watching the ballots get stacked face up one records every vote you see against the individual / party it is for — this is sampling, I know this!
the question here would be, why? it cannot change an outcome at this point. but the answer is that political parties do a polling station by polling station massive A/B test, they leaflet those streets, canvas these ones, and do nothing over there... the sampling of various boxes within an area tells them what the most effective way to spend the money campaigning in the next election.

I did the count sampling for 5 polling stations.

00:00

it was midnight before the verification phase was fully done, and the count could now actually begin.

after the verification all of the verified ballots are now pooled together, as each seat in the UK represents approx 80K people, this means you may have up to that amount... there was a 63% turnout in this seat (David Lammy's), so approx 50K votes to count.

first up is sorting... which is done in pairs and eagle-eyed by Labour and Lib Dems people in this area as they were #1 and #2 last time around, and they also have the staff numbers to do so (Labour had about 30 people, Lib Dems had 15, I was here as a volunteer for the Greens who had 4 :joy: ).

at this point we went to get food and drink, and got to watch the failure of the only telly where people were watching along, the huge disappointment of Labour losing to Corbyn, an awful moment where a person in the Conservative group celebrated Farage getting a seat and saying out loud "at least we have Reform to fall back on", and general shenanigans — this part I liked the least, there's some definite fringe elements of all parties that is the uglier side to the whole thing.

03:00

back in the hall the counting is underway, the sorted piles are all bull-clipped into various sized bunches, and now the 80-100 people counting each seat are all doing their "count to 10, paper clip the stack, count the corner to confirm 10, count another corner to confirm 10".

all counts are batches of 10, which are then batched into 10, and then stacked in central tables as 10s... with the "odds" (i.e. remainders) all bull clipped and clearly numbered beside it.
this is being done centrally, you get a pretty good idea at this time who has won, mine was such a safe seat that it was known from the outset.

04:00

David Lammy's seat was first to finish and declare, so I got to watch that and video it. No idea what was broadcast but a lot of the really minor parties were protesting the Gaza conflict very vocally whilst he gave his speech.

Shortly after was Catherine West's seat, which is my ward, she's been the MP for ages and is loved by everyone, no protests for her, and everyone from all sides was nice, she also went out of her way to speak to every other candidate before they went up.

Greens, who I was with, expected 3rd or 4th in both races, and came 2nd in both races. Both were paper candidates, my one has a main job as an Actor, an extra, in the background of Eastenders, so was very happy he was suitably qualified for standing behind Catherine West.

all in all a good experience... would highly recommend volunteering for this again, it was great to see how meticulous and professional, how secure and verified, the vote counting process is.