Rise of the Tallymen!

I have returned from my travails and to get back into the blogging swing of things here is an enormous post on a subject only of interest to electoral geeks. Don`t say I`m not good to you.

Hands up all of those who have heard of ballot box sampling?

Those with their hands up are probably in political parties and have taken part in a sample. Those with their hands down who are happy learn more about this particular form electoral geekery should read on…

…Those who don`t should probably go and have a nice cup of tea.

To understand ballot box sampling you first must understand the process of votes being counted. The simple version is that there are constituencies in which we vote. Those constituencies are made up of polling districts, and those polling districts are made up of polling places.

Those polling places will then have all the streets in their area divided among a number of ballot boxes. Your address determines which box> polling place> polling district and ultimately> constituency in which you vote.

When polls close at 10pm the ballot boxes are sped to a central counting point. The boxes are put in the counting hall ready for the count officials to take action. The count hall itself is divided into a number of tables who have a few count officials waiting at them. There are a number of more senior officials who supply the tables with votes to be counted.

Also in the hall, behind a rail away from the count officials, are representatives of the different candidates/parties as well as journalists etc. The rail that separates the parties etc and the count officials means that the parties can see the votes being counted and point out if errors are made – but prevents the parties etc from directly interacting with the votes themselves.

The vote takes part in two stages, the ‘verification count’ and the count proper. The verification count is simply to count how many votes there are in total in each of the ballot boxes. The reason for this is so that when the count proper takes place there can be a ‘verification’ that the right number of votes have been counted.

A table of count officials will be presented a box. The box will have a code written on it which identifies which box it is – and hence which polling place, polling district and constituency it belongs to.

While this verification count is being carried out the votes cast are visible to the parties and reps. At this stage the rep will try and Tally as many votes as they can from a given box. The rep now has a rough Tally of the votes cast in that particular ballot box. Along with other reps from their party who have taken Tallies of other boxes they can use the codes provided on each box to piece together not only a rough Tally for the constituency but also for each polling place and polling district.

But why do this I hear you ask? Why not wait for the result itself which is but hours away?

There are a few reasons. Chief amongst them is to try and get a rough idea if your candidate has won. If you have a decent Tally which shows your candidate getting a narrow victory then come later in the evening when the count proper is taking place and it shows you candidate narrowly losing then the knowledge of the ballot box sample can bolster you to challenge for a recount.

Additionally this information is useful to the parties. While the count is going on there is of course round the clock TV and radio coverage. Until such times as the results start flowing in after a wee while the party reps are going to run out of things to say. These ballot box samples allow the parties to gauge before the count has really begun how they are likely to do. So if Party A has spent the campaign saying that they are going to form the government and the ballot box sample shows them falling well short of that aspiration then their reps on TV and radio can start backtracking before the real pain of the results begin. As well as a hundred other uses – ‘we’ve done a lot of work in constituency X and I`ve got a good feeling about it’…you get the idea.

After this verification count stage and the ballot box sampling then we move onto the count proper. Which, of course, produces the actual results.

This fine a noble art form of ballot box sampling seemed to be dead in the water when electronic counting was unveiled for Scottish Parliament and Local Authority elections. Electoral statistic geeks from across the party political divide heaved a weary sad sigh.

With electronic counting there would be no chance to sample the verification count. Because the machines were meant to be so whizzy even if you tried watching a machine you wouldn`t get the code from the box it was counting so you wouldn`t know where it was from. Also unlike in a hand count one machine could count from different constituencies one after the other rather than doing only one constituency as the count officials would in a hand count.

The only ballots you would see were the ones the machines couldn`t identify. Sampling these was useless as, again, you couldn`t tell which ballot box they came from. Like me the other Tallymen and Tallywomen packed away their sample sheets and pencils. We packed away our laptops with our excel spreadsheets. And watched this fantastic new system that was destroying our very way of electoral geek life…

We watched on as the ballots began to be loaded into the scanners…looks were shared between Tallymen from different parties. Adversaries who had stood side by side at counting tables for years joined together in the mutual knowledge that the Scotland Office had entrusted the counting of Scotland’s votes to a room full of dodgy photocopiers.

It was then that we Tallymen realised that we may be down, but we were not out.

In the time after the election it became clear just how much of a shambles the count was. We made our case for electronic voting to be consigned to history until it was at a stage it worked.

We were denied. Electronic counting was here to stay they said. STV would be too much hassle to count by hand they said.

The Irish general election came and was, of course, hand-counted. The results came through and the drama of an STV election was allowed to unfold. But in the RTE studios they had a rough idea of the result. But how could they have known? The Tallymen told them what the result would be. Such is the importance of the role of the Tallymen in Ireland that RTE themselves had a crack team of Tallymen at the counts for them.

A few council by-elections came and went in Scotland. And again the electronic counting made a hash of it.

It seems that now hand counts may be used for council by-elections at least but following the Gould report there is a desire to improve the electronic counting system rather than scrap it. Although the Scottish Government concedes that public confidence would have to be foremost in considering these things.

So electronic counting is to remain for Scottish Parliament votes and local authority votes for now. Council by-elections, Westminster and EU elections will all still be hand-counted.

Tallymen and Tallywomen may have been bruised by the introduction of electronic counting, but we are not yet beaten. We will wait quietly in the background, Tallysheets at hand waiting for the call and the rise of the Tallymen!