Sep
8
The Save General Election night campaign which was sparked off in the blogosphere yesterday shows Westminster politicos at their worst. I say this with feeling because a couple of years ago, I would have been on their side.
For the uninitiated, many election polls get counted on a Thursday night / Friday morning. If the count is close, they often get suspended at around 4am and resume the next day. However, an increasing number of local authorities are opting to count the ballot papers on the Friday morning.
Advocates of the campaign dress up their views in the following terms:
- It would be a backward step in the modern era to have to wait for something (Iain Dale)
- The sense of excitement increases public engagement (Mark Pack)
- Fewer people will be able to follow the results coming in (Jonathan Isaby) I kid you not
Back in the day I would have agreed with them. I enjoyed late night counts even though I was once so tired I crashed my car (ok, my parents) on my 18th birthday. But now it’s apparent to me that:
- late night counts are more expensive (overtime for council workers, extra pay for volunteers, OT for the police)
- it’s only politicos who care whether the result is announced at 4am on Friday morning or 12pm on the same day
- Saturday is perfectly good for getting media coverage
- mistakes can be made counting identical sheets of paper in the early hours of the morning. In the interests of protecting the excitement of a few nerds, it’s probably better to get the result right
If politics, and the people involved in it, really want to command respect, be admired by the public and have politics held in self-esteem perhaps it would be better to look outwards first before trying to protect absurd traditions.
Related posts:
I’m very dubious of the claim that, “Saturday is perfectly good for getting media coverage”. Would sports coverage really not heavily eat in to the political coverage? Can you imagine ITV giving over several hours of its Saturday schedule to politics? What’s the reason you think otherwise?
My view is that most of the election coverage that people watch (as opposed to you and me) is on Friday during the day and that evening. Most of the result coverage would be on Friday and the newspaper coverage would be on a Saturday (as happens with Thursday night counts anyway).
There isn’t (yet, perhaps) a trade-off in terms of space between sports coverage and news.
I don’t think Londoners were unaware that Boris Johnson was Mayor of London by the Monday morning, despite the result being announced at 10pm on Friday night and if they didn’t know about it on that very day, I can’t find any evidence that it had any impact on faith in elections or awareness of Boris.
I would return to the central point: do the advantages of having early morning news bulletins on a Friday reporting election results outweigh the costs of tired (expensively paid) counters getting it wrong?
Saturday day time TV? I think there is a news/sports trade-off there.
As for accuracy, to quote a post of mine:
“In theory this sounds a good point, but in practice my experience of count errors – and there have been some real howlers that I have seen in person or dealt with at the end of a phone line – is that they have very little to do with tired people making mistakes.
“In practice the big factor is how well or badly the count is being run – and that’s to do with issues like planning, the quality of the people running the show and their levels of interest in running a good operation. Being tired isn’t the issue.”
( http://www.libdemvoice.org/saving-general-election-night-roundup-of-reaction-16084.html )
I think we’re getting too detailed here but if the results are counted Friday morning then they would mostly be ready for Friday TV news – as now.
Yes, you are right in practice re mistakes but the priority for a count must be to get it right and the suggestion that people aren’t more likely to get it wrong because they’re tired is counter-intuitive.
I mean this all in a comradely fashion because ultimately:
a) this matters not one jot and
b) no one outside our small word really cares