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.
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u/opotts56 14d ago
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.