By Anthony Painter / @anthonypainter
ConservativeHome has begun a campaign to ensure that election night is election results night and local councils must not push the count into the following day following on from a piece in the Sunday Times. I absolutely endorse this campaign. I can not think of anything worse than predicting who has formed the next government on the basis of- usually inaccurate- exit polls.
Even if the exit polls were accurate on a national basis, they would still not predict the result in a close election so we may well not know the colour of the next government until well into the following day. Tom Harris and Liberal Democrat, Mark Pack have given the campaign their support so it is genuinely cross-party.
Jonathan Isaby explains his arguments here and there is also a Facebook group. But none of us will benefit from the recent changes that a number of local councils have made- for cost and convenience reasons- and that is just not good enough.
Election night is a central part of our democratic culture and so it should remain. Perhaps we can find some consensus on this?
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Will it be Jacqui Smith? Shaun Woodward? Alistair Darling?
Overnight prog deffo required!
At it happens, I think our kids spend several years more than needed at school so am not bothered about them losing a day - and polling stations could be else where if it were a real problem.
I am very keen for the count to be completed as quickly as possible, every second cut from browns premiership and labours governance is another reason to rejoice and celebrate.
http://blog.matthewcain.co.uk/save-general-election-night-campaign-politicos-at-their-worst/
Trust a leftie to invent a victim. The police get overtime, the counters have been recruited from local banks and building societies and are volunteers getting close to double time for it.
The job is popular among both police and counters for the overtime, have you ever heard of a count not being able to staff it.
The only person who isn't paid extra is the returning officer himself. This is also the individual who decides if the count is done on Thursday night or Friday morning. Maybe we need to bung these guys a few quid to play along.
Yes, a very simple matter for the government. Could be sorted out within five minutes of a few morning session of parliament.
Ask your MP to get involved.
What is the cost? what is the saving? if counting on fridays has advantages then why not consider voting on fridays? etc... What about larger or smaller ares being covered by a polling station so counting can be done by more or fewer people? What about a more automated counting system (the post office handle millions of letters with ocr/coding etc) - not chads and stuff, just quicker processing of existing paper. Why 'fold' the ballot paper randomly? - envelopes would keep them flat, could be opened automatically and papers would be flat for processing... etc... etc...
With the millions and millions of taxpayer pounds that labour have thrown into reviews of our voting system, have they actually considered any of this? or did prescott spend it all in pies?
Election night is also a kind of festival of democracy. We break our normal routines, and end up shattered, elated or crushed, in the early hours of the morning.
We take days off to celebrate bank closures: we could at least celebrate one of the most important achievements of our culture - the right to vote - and why not have a bank holiday on the Friday after?
Would help my hangover
No need to spend money we can avoid not spending, but a bit of overtime every four or five years is quite acceptable to see democracy conducted in a timely manner.
Abosulately agree i love sitting up till the early hours watching the results come in , And its good to see all parties agreeing and standing up to tradition .
If only we could Work together on other issuses i think it would help more than hurt , I think the time for petty politics is gone and we need to be honest about what we will do and wether we will keep all our promises this time as that is the most important thing we need to regain the trust of our own members and others .
I dont know if we can do it but we must try
ricki
Absolutely we can. Across the political divide we spend at least weeks if not months building up to election night. If I have just a large amount of my time working on a particular campaign for a candidate I want to know what the result is as soon as humanly possible, not the next day.
Scrapping election night would be the mother of all anti-climaxes. It has to be some bunch of half wit un-political civil servants who fancy getting an early night every four or five years behind this notion.
Your lot has the whip hand in parliament right now. So one of your members must introduce an one line bill stating that in this country we count the ballots in a general election as soon as possibly practical.
Save election night!