17/05/2021
Ann and I broke new ground last week. We’ve never worked together before (except in the areas of home-building and child-rearing), and neither of us have worked anywhere for the past two years. But here we were driving to work together on a Monday morning, slightly fearful that we hadn’t left early enough to get through the Abingdon rush hour. Better to sit for half an hour in the work car park, than to wait half an hour at home and arrive late – I’m sure was the thinking behind this.
We weren’t late. After queuing for ages with the other election count officials we were in the counting hall and sitting at our own socially distanced desks in the vast indoor tennis hall. I’d been here two Decembers ago, for the General Election, when it had been all hands to the deck throughout the night. This was a little more laid back.
There were five of us in the team, and a supervisor. It was duly noted that we had two Anns, one Anna and an Andrew in the team. The fifth member, boringly, had a completely different forename. And the supervisor was called Ann too. How wonderful! Two thirds of the team had also counted in recent days at the County Council elections and so were well-versed in the techniques. Except that this was, importantly, a slightly different sort of election.
COVID had seen to it that all elections are conducted slightly differently. People in the counting hall normally sit fairly close to each other, work together at sorting baskets, and exchange piles of ballots to check each other’s work. Now we were very definitely not required to sit closely together, and to count everything twice as a self-check. Each desk had a large plastic screen on the front so that the scrutineers, the agents and officials who can, if they want, stand in front of your desk and observe what you do, remain socially distanced.
But this election had an unusual ballot paper. There were two columns into each of which a single X could be marked. The left-most was the first preference, and the other the second preference. Our first task seemed quite straightforward. There were four candidates, and we had four wire baskets placed between us each labelled with a candidate’s name. All we had to do was to inspect the First Preference column for an X against a name, and then place the ballot paper into the appropriate wire basket. This is called sorting. However, you have to keep your wits about you because ballot papers must be pulled out if the voter has selected more than one candidate, or no candidates at all – these are spoiled papers. Papers are also spoiled if the voter has decided to register some kind of protest by writing or drawing on the ballot. But they are not spoiled if the voter has employed a tick or a Y or even a squiggle to indicate their choice – as long as it is inside the box. A paper is still valid if the voter has changed their mind and scribbled out their first attempt and placed a new X elsewhere. So, quite a lot going on.
The supervisor had made it clear that accuracy was far more important than speed. It wasn’t a race. Yet one of the A’s to my left had got her rubber thimble and was flick-flick-flick-flicking at around a ballot a second. We weren’t panicked.
The next job was to count the now homogenous piles for each candidate. The supervisor had flicked through to make sure the piles were homogenous. It was our job to count, and recount, piles of ten and to secure each pile with a paper clip. Ten such piles are rubber-banded together to make a hundred. Although we weren’t expected to check at this stage, I found several examples of the wrong candidate in the ‘homogenous’ pile. Probably due to Mrs Flick-flick-flick to my left. This is quite simple, but essential, to resolve. If candidate B is counted in the pile for candidate A, then B is one vote down, and A is one vote up – compounding the issue.
By some miracle the grand total for our team exactly matched the total reported by the polling station. It was midday by then. We simply had to sit and wait whilst other teams recounted in order to get their numbers to match too. Then the numbers had to be accepted by the count headquarters, probably in Reading. And then we had to wait for Reading to assimilate the results for all the counting stations up and down the Thames Valley. In fact, this wasn’t achieved until about 4pm.
We occupied ourselves by strolling around the tennis hall, strolling to the portable loos outside the hall and returning by the half-mile route to secure a one-way flow through the building, doing a sudoku, visiting the coffee van outside the hall, going to the loo again, and so on.
The supervisor explained to us that if one of the candidates got 50% or more of the vote on the basis of the first preference, then they had won outright, and we could all go home. A ridiculous thought went through my mind. What if more than one candidate got more than 50% of the vote? Phew, I was glad I didn’t say this out loud. Then I thought I would say it out loud, to get a laugh, and then excuse my stupidity on the grounds that it was less extreme than that of a government minister. The minister for Education had once told parliament that he wanted ALL schools to be above average. There was a minor ripple of approval.
No candidate did get more than 50%. We had to go into a second stage where we would sort and count on the basis of the second preference. Once again, our team got the total bang on again – in spite of the best efforts of Mrs Flick-flick-flick. And again, we had to sit and wait for our colleagues to recount. And then wait again while HQ determined that a general recount wouldn’t be necessary. Finally, we were allowed to go home at 7pm.
The key advice for elections like this is that if you have a candidate you would really like to win. Make them both your first and your second preference. Initially I thought this would invalidate the paper. It doesn’t. It gives your chosen candidate the best chance of making it through.
It had been a 9.5-hour day at £14 an hour. The team were actively working for about 3.5 hours and waiting for six. But just as in the General Election, I went home satisfied that the process is sound, and that fair play was properly observed. If only the American electorate could emulate this feat.
