Postal ballots and close margins explain most of the wait.
On a typical election night most of the Assembly’s 61 seats are declared before breakfast. Count staff in sports halls across Calder, Harrow and the valley sort and tally the ballot papers, the returning officer reads out the figures, and the winner makes a short speech to a room of tired activists. But every few years a handful of seats stretch on for a day, two days or, once, nearly a week. With the Assembly as finely balanced as it is – no party holding more than 24 seats – those slow counts can decide who governs. So why do they happen?
The postal vote problem
The single biggest factor is the postal vote. Around one in four voters in the region now votes by post, and the proportion is far higher in the hill towns and among older residents. Postal ballots that arrive before polling day are checked in advance: officials verify the signature and date of birth on each return against the records held on file, then keep the ballot papers sealed until the count. But many arrive late, either by post in the final days or handed in at polling stations on the day itself. Those have to be verified on the night, one by one, before they can be counted.
In most seats that adds an hour or two. In seats with a large rural electorate, such as Harrow Moor or the two hill-town constituencies held by independents, it can add much more. Ballots handed in at a remote polling station have to be driven to the count centre, sometimes across forty miles of hill road, and only then can verification begin.
“People imagine we are being slow on purpose, or that something has gone wrong,” said Bernadette Quayle, a returning officer with twenty years’ experience of Assembly counts. “Almost always it is the opposite. We are being careful because the margin is tight, and the law requires us to get it exactly right rather than quickly right.”
When the margin is too close to call
The second factor is the margin itself. If the gap between the top two candidates is small – the rules do not set a figure, but returning officers tend to look closely at anything under a few hundred votes – any candidate or agent can request a recount. The returning officer has discretion to refuse if the request seems unreasonable, but in practice a genuinely close result will almost always be recounted at least once. Each recount of a seat with around 45,000 votes cast can take three or four hours.
Recounts also involve adjudicating doubtful ballots: papers marked with a tick outside the box, two crosses, or a voter’s initials. These are set aside during the first count and examined by the returning officer in front of all the candidates’ agents. In a seat decided by a handful of votes, each of those decisions matters, and the arguments over them can be lengthy. At the last election, the Selwyn South count was suspended overnight after a dispute over 37 doubtful papers, and resumed the next morning.
Occasionally a count is paused simply because staff are exhausted. Count teams often start work at ten at night after a full day running polling stations. Returning officers are allowed to adjourn and resume in daylight if they judge that accuracy would suffer by continuing.
What it means for the result
Because no party is near a majority, every seat counts when it comes to forming a government. Party leaders often hold back from claiming victory until the slow seats have reported, and coalition talks can stall while they wait. Political scientist Tomasz Wren, who studies the Assembly at the university in Calder, said the uncertainty was a feature of the system rather than a flaw.
“A small parliament with a fragmented vote will always have a few seats on a knife-edge,” he said. “The alternative is to rush the count and accept more mistakes, and I do not think voters want that.” Wren noted that no Assembly result in the past two decades has been overturned after declaration, which he attributed to the care taken during recounts.
There are proposals to speed things up. The electoral commission has suggested moving the deadline for postal votes forward by a day, so that all of them can be verified before polls close. Opponents argue that would disenfranchise voters in the hill towns, where post can be slow. For now, the best advice for anyone waiting on a close seat is the same as ever: go to bed, and check again in the morning.
