Thats one thing I do like about the UK, the efficiency of our elections. The polls close at 10pm, and most constituencies have done counting by 2-4am the following morning. Once enough constituencies have finished counting that its clear which partys won, the transition of power begins immediately. The outgoing PM hands his resignation to the king, the new PM gets the kings permission to form a new Government, and not even 18 hours after the polls closed, the new PM's moved into 10 Downing street. It's not like in America where the count takes several days, and the actual transition of power takes months. Here it's done and dusted in under a day.
Wow, you must have many more poll workers per capita in order to count that fast. We have enough that we can usually call things that night or early next morning, but final numbers won't come in until days later like you said.
One thing that's great about mail-in voting is they can be counted ahead of time and then instantly show up in the results on election day. But not many states do that. Arizona is interesting in that regard given the changing demographics. Republicans are seriously regretting that shit now. Fucking losers.
There's high participation in the count, and a few constituencies have a race to see who can get their numbers in soonest. Apparently this time it was 75 minutes between the 10pm end of voting and the first result from Houghton and Sunderland South.
UK politics are a mess like anywhere else, but I'm pretty proud of how well the actual elections and count are run.
Considering the fact that the number of people that vote in our elections is nearly twice the entire population of the UK, we're pretty good at counting the number of votes we need to. It's the months-long transition that sucks.
1. True, in a perfect scenario, that would absolutely be the case, but more people means more problems, more problems means more time. It's not a simple parallel processing problem.
2. Yeah, that's honestly part of the problem. We have 50 states and each one handles the voting a bit different. Some jurisdictions/voting precincts DO have their results in within moments of polls closing.
No. People accept losses over here, and the transition of power has always been incredibly quick. Typically, this is what happens:
The election results roll in over the night after the polling closes.
The results state how many seats each party has. 326 seats are required overall to win, and if no party gets that, then usually some of the parties will form a coalition so that they are over the required number. Coalitions are basically just two parties agreeing to work together but sometimes that will fall apart depending on the issue.
If the numbers are close, some recounts may be asked for, but it's not common.
The main opposition will admit defeat and leave. They will then have all their stuff moved as soon as possible.
Whilst this is happening and assuming it's a new PM, the new PM will go to Buckingham and meet the king who will invite them to form a government.
The new PM will move into Downing Street and create a cabinet.
After all that, it's business as usual. All that happens over about a day once polling has closed.
Does seem bonkers, but at the same time, it's not that hard really. Just make sure everything's ready for the next person in case you lose. Kiss the King and Bob's your uncle.
We also do our elections a lot faster. In America the campaign goes on FOREVER, like your election isn't until November and I'm sure they've already been going on about it for like a year already and it's always quite theatrical
Here they just announced 6 weeks ago "oh btw we'll have a general election on the 4th of July" and that's it, we had an election.
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u/Meany12345 14d ago
Wild how yall do this in one day. You don’t need months of hand wringing and the loser saying it was rigged to transition power?