| Topic: | Re:Re:Re:Why can’t Wandsworth Council count? | |
| Posted by: | John Kettlekey | |
| Date/Time: | 22/07/24 17:36:00 |
| > Is it not incompetent to discount by 6000 when declaring an election result? Indeed. I would have expected there to be a paper and pencil check prior to declaring the results rather than blindly trusting whatever a spreadsheet says. A friend of a friend was a party observer in a different constituency. When I described the news article about Putney he said it could never have happened in the count he was present at. Simply put they get the numbers of ballots in each ballot box and these are entered on a sheet of paper. When they open the ballot box they count the number of ballots, prior to sorting, and this should match the count of ballots that were issued (and should be in the box). If there a discrepancy then they count things again. Counting is done by grouping ballots in bundles of 10 (I think) by a bulldog type clip on one corner. A verification count is done on each bundle, by a different person, counting the ballots from a different corner - this makes it more likely to catch instances where two ballot papers are stuck together in one corner. They then unbundle the ballots for a particular ballot box and sort them, and these are again bundled and then counted (twice in a similar method as above). The totals for each party (and number spoiled) can then be checked against the total number of ballots for that box. Any discrepancy and they count things again. Ballots from different ballot boxes are never mixed. They remain on separate tables far enough away from each other. At the end of it you should have, per ballot box, the number of ballots for each candidate and the number of spoiled ballots. Even if you enter this information into a spreadsheet there should be a very simple basic check before declaring the final result to ensure that the total number of ballots equals the total number of ballots that were in the boxes. Adding 60 (rough number of ballot boxes) numbers together (that represented the number of ballots in each ballot box) is something that can be done on pencil+paper with or without a calculator. It can be done by several people independently and considered good if everyone comes up with the same figure(s). It would then be very obvious that something is wrong if this hand derived number is ~6,500 different from the number on a spreadsheet. But it seems this is one of the important steps that was missed in the final verification. It would seem that this kind of check was eventually done, which prompted the council to investigate the discrepancy. Shame it wasn't done before the original declaration. Mistakes do happen, and it's important to ensure that they do not happen again in the future. I would be very surprised if the verification steps described above weren't part of the official process/guidance so it does sound like incompetence, and the buck would ultimately stop with the returning officer on the night. As others have said, it's lucky that the miscount did not affect the result of the election. |