Saturday 7 May 2011

Waiting for the result....

After seven hours of counting, interspersed with assorted periods of faffing about followed by best part of an hour sitting waiting for some bureaucratic numpty in Wakefield to "validate" the number of votes in the AV referendum, we got a result (see earlier blog post for details).

Just so you know, it shouldn't take seven hours to count fewer than 5000 votes - it really shouldn't. Even when there are three separate elections going on. Yet that was what it took - including well over an hour to validate the contents of just one ballot box. And, in the process 100 (well two bundles) of Bingley Rural postal votes turned up in the Bingley Town count and another 100 Conservative votes (that's my votes) were placed in the Labour pile.

When councils cut corners on organisation, when fussy (and unnecessary) national quangos like the Electoral Commission insist of daft second-guessing, and when lawyers crawl over the counting of votes the result is an unsatisfactory system characterised by mistrust, inefficiency and pointless secondary checks.

I was told that "...the priority is accuracy" - which given the number of errors we observed in the counting process is a glorious irony. I watched counting clerks check the same bundle of votes three - even four times - before banding them! And in one case we had to point out that following this check and recheck and recheck process there were still only 48 votes in the "50 vote" batch!

Seven hours is too long and, in my bones I know, the process was no more accurate than the process used in other places and in times past that took up a great deal less time! Maybe we shouldn't pay the staff by the hour?

....

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

huh? wouldn't paying staff by the hour would just encourage them to take longer? congratulations by the way

SadButMadLad said...

What were the real problems. Too much bureacracy affecting the clerks who were doing their best in difficult circumstances or just crap clerks. And were they council employees who had done a full days work and then worked through the night too.