Monday, April 07, 2008
Can There Be a Mayoral Recount?
It seems that the wallahs at City Hall are preparing for a Mugabe-style delayed result on May 2nd, by which I mean that despite the count taking place on Friday, the venue has been booked until Sunday morning in case, er, anything should 'go wrong'. Things look very close in the mayoral race, but the only trouble is that there is apparently no provision for a recount in the rules of the mayoral election and the only recounts that can be undertaken are per Borough. Perhaps someone could clarify this?
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Text the Prime Minister tonight!
Ask "Why have you broken your election promise and not held a referendum on neutering our Parliament and Democracy?" or anything else you choose for that matter.
The following are the details from the Lying Labour Party itself:
Text Gordon
Tonight Gordon Brown will hold a live webcast at 7pm on labour.org.uk to answer your questions ahead of the 2008 local elections on 1 May.
You can ask a question by texting GORDON to 60022 followed by your question and your name.
You can also ask a question by visiting www.labour.org.uk/local_elections
Labels: Brown's Britain
What about a Lib Dum Leadership recount . Is it true that if they had counted the postal votes properly Huhne would have won ?
What about a Lib Dum Leadership recount . Is it true that if they had counted the postal votes properly Huhne would have won ?
Section 52 of the Greater London Authority Election Rules 2007 covers recounts, so yes a recount can take place, the rules were simply put in place by SI rather than primary legislation.
What may be causing some confusion is that what the rules do not allow on a recount is any reconsideration of ballot ruled void by a returning officer at the first time of asking if these have be spat out by an electronic counting system.
So what happens is that if an electronic counting system is used and a ballot paper is rejected, that ballot paper is then assessed manually and can be allowed into the manual count, voided in its entirety or can have any alternative vote rejected if this is incorrectly marked.
Once that is done, then the ruling of the returning officer is final and a candidate cannot request that voids be reassessed and re-admitted into the count, so there's no arguments over hanging chads allowed.
Hope that clears things up.
Iain,
I would take a look at this page on London Elects.
The votes are tallied by GLA constituency and then transmitted electronically to City Hall.
If there was a problem with (say) West Central's electronic counting system, it would be possible to order a manual recount in that constituency without doing the whole of London. If it was necessary, a London-wide recount could be ordered by having recounts in each constituency.
You might be aware that some London councils don't count their council results until the Friday after an election (LB Hackney, for example) for the simple reason that it's cheaper to employ people during the day than at night.
As to booking until Sunday - the same page I link to above gives the estimate for doing things by hand. In other words, if the electronic system falls over it would take from Friday to Sunday to count.
So serial unwed dad is expecting something to "go wrong", eh?
He's going to have to be watched like a hawk, and so are all his cohorts.
The ballots are counted electronically, so Ken won't need a recount he will just get his techies to sort it.
I work for London Elects, which is in charge of organising the poll.
1) In the rules, there's no provision for a London-wide recount but there is for a constituency (these are 2-4 boroughs in size) one. This is the decision of the local returning officer.
2) There are 3 count venues not 1; ExCel (counting 4 constituencies), Alexandra Palace (4) and Olympia (6).
3) One of the venues is booked longer than the others - until Sunday - as a contingency measure against power failure, fire, flood etc etc.
4) It's also worth bearing in mind that there is a lot of kit involved in e-counting (over 200 scanners - each with monitors and PCs attached, plus all the networking bumph) and this will take some hours to take apart.
5) Counting under complex electoral systems the next day is better for the simple reason that some sleep intervenes between polling day and count day.
I hope this answers the question.
But please take a look at the London Elects site - there's even a video explaining how the e-counting will work.
Matt, Many thanks for such an informative post.
hope your not using the computerized system they used for the Scottish election because never mind having the Hall booked to the Sunday you could be there till the following week
Nice to have a private space for "quality time" with the ballots, real or virtual - just like the Democrats tried on Florida in 2000.
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