The end of Britain's weeks-long general elections
historytoday.com
historytoday.com
On the day, the polls close at 10pm, and the first results come in about an hour later (Sunderland South holds the record at 10:48pm). The whole thing is effectively done by about 4am - 6am the next morning, depending on how close it is.
That's why I don't understand why in US presidential elections, it takes weeks to get the result. Why isn't it done overnight? The uncertainty doesn't seem to help at all.
As we go back to pre-Covid voting routines tallying should happen within hours - just like the Obama and Trump wins. Everyone knew before they went to bed.
There are lots of other valid reasons to vote by mail. In fact, living abroad is only a valid reason in a minority of states. Depending on what state you last lived in before moving abroad, you may not be able to legally vote at all.
All states let you vote by mail if you are going to be traveling out of your polling district for the entirety time the polls are open on Election Day, or are sick and cannot go in-person. But some states let you vote by mail without a specific reason, and a few states run all elections by mail.
The ballot closes at 10pm, counting starts as soon as the boxes arrive. The first places have counted about 50,000 votes and declared the Reilly by 11pm, most finish about 4am, 6 hours in. The final places (which rely on boxes to travel from various islands on ferries or helicopters) can take nearly 24 hours.
If mail-in continues to be popular then states could move towards the Oregon model and have counts done just as fast as before.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/election-results-timing...
(The UK convention is that the PM resigns as soon as an alternative PM candidate has the votes to secure the support of the House of Commons, which is usually the morning after the vote. Technically they could hang on and let the monarch decide if and when to recognise the alternative PM, but there's no much incentive for them to do so.)
The system also tends to be centered around the idea of good faith which admittedly is a bit tattered.
Many of our problems result from solutions to the problems of 200 years ago.
Now you sound like a Unix user.
It’s one part premature calling, one part Electoral College and one part Congress’ timeline.
Premature Calling:
The United States is huge and we don’t have one Federal Election, we have fifty-one which are relevant to the Presidency/Vice Presidency and fifty which are relevant to the voting members of the House and Senate. There are also additional elections for non-voting members of the House from DC and the five territories.
Some of those elections are not certified on Election Day, not because you can’t tell who basically won, but as a matter of process you really do have to count every vote and each jurisdiction handles the logistics of that not just for the Federal Elections but the States’ own elections.
Electoral College:
We don’t elect the President. We elect the mooks who will then go on to elect the President and Vice President through the Electoral College. Those mooks are appointed by Congress depending upon the outcome, which is a winner-takes all popular vote in 48 States and split in 2 States where the winner of House seats in two States secure their party’s nominee one electoral college vote each. The Electoral College vote quantity that comes from those States’ Senate apportionment (2 per State) are still winner take all, and I believe both of those States still only have a single House seat each (EC vote quantity is House apportionment + Senate apportionment) so in practice it affects 2 total Electoral College votes across all the States, but I’m going off memory so someone can correct me if I’m wrong.
States must have their slate of electors appointed 6 days before the Electors are due to meet in their respective States, and this year they are meeting December 17th. When they meet on that date, they’ll vote for both President and Vice President.
Congressional Timing:
The States will then send the votes to Congress and they will be received by the Archivist by no later than December 25th. The next Congress will resume business on January 3rd 2025, at which point the Archivist will deliver the results of the Electoral College votes to the new Congress who will deliberate on January 6th to count and certify the votes.
Once that’s done and if Congress doesn’t have to decide a tie, we officially know who the next President will be, and 14 days later on January 20th he will be sworn in at noon.
It’s slow, tedious, and given faithless electors are usually prosecuted in their States, if not having their votes declared invalid, we could probably save a lot of time by removing them from the equation, but some reforms would require a constitutional amendment and others wouldn’t, so inertia rules the day.
The Westminster system has some advantages, but you also have a Head of State divorced from the scene of electoral politics until the very end when the next Prime Minister—a Prime Minister-elect at this point?—asks the King permission to form the next government. We do not, so this is the compromise we’ve developed and somewhat refined.
https://www.archives.gov/electoral-college/key-dates
This has the full timeline from Election Day to Inauguration Day. Not on there is that mail-in ballots for States that have them arrive sometime in the preceding month, but thats determined by their own laws.
Only one modern presidential election in the US has taken weeks to get a result, and that only happened because the election was incredibly close - it was decided by a margin of 0.009%, which then prompted an automatic recount by law, leading to court battles.
The next-longest was 2020, which took about 4.5 days, and that's in large part because of differences in process due to COVID-19. The actual election was not close; the counting was just much slower (and specifically slower in several close states).
We have a weird multi stage counting process and only the final one is truly definitive.
In general, for Presidential elections the gap is significant enough that TV stations announce the winner at 8pm sharp (with a countdown for good effect).
Not that it's so simple necessarily, I remember one friend lived in Vauxhall at the time of one of those elections, after the Brexit referendum and its aftermath but before implementation. People there had been such reliable Labour voters that they weren't even looking at their candidate. Which had been Kate Hoey. Now, Vauxhall is the kind of place that's voting Labour because of social politics, they're proud of their gay night scene, they've got a lot of Vegans, they're inner city folks so they don't want hunting with guns and dogs, they're against wars and they like Europe. Hoey is [at that time] a Labour MP but she's anti-gay, she supporting hunting and wants more guns... and of course she's Pro-Brexit. She's a terrible fit, but hey, they're a solid Labour constituency. Nobody I met there had any idea. To them you go to the poll, you pick Labour, you're done. Sending some woman who wants you and your friends dead and opposes everything you stand for? They had no idea.
I urged him and his wife to actually read about their candidates now that Hoey was gone (she resigned), but not sure if they ever did before they moved out here. You don't need to know your representative very well (I do, but won't when he is replaced next time) but you should at least know who they are and what they're about (his would-be replacement is the woman who leads my city government, unremarkable, seems basically competent)
That had more to do with the media being owned by British oligarchs obsessed with nuking a threat to their wealth. They hated the guy who hid in a fridge but they preferred him to the guy who was going to tax them a lot more.
In 2017 the fairness in broadcasting laws kicked in just before the election and when Labour got equal airtime in the media there was a straight line climb in popularity as people actually heard the unfiltered views of the opposition. That straight line climb is what led to the hung parliament. A few more weeks of that and it would have been a Labour victory.
During the last election those laws were ignored and Boris was treated as some sort of white knight in shining brexit armour by the same people who dispatched him with partygate and he was duly elected.
In this election Labour has the full endorsement of those media-owning oligarchs not because it is run by competent leadership (starmer is a moron), but because unlike the last guy he's very oligarch friendly. Their wealth is safe with him in charge.
One thing I found it quite interesting was seeing people on Twitter etc. who some years ago I’d seen giving support to smears of “antisemitism” hurled at politicians (including actually Jewish ones) in the Labour Party for voicing opposition of the Israeli Government’s policies and actions towards the Palestinian people, now condemning the Israeli Government in even stronger terms than those politicians ever had…
Maybe if they'd had good general elections they'd have made different decisions around WWI and averted all that.
https://www.amazon.com/Law-Profits-Cyril-Northcote-Parkinson...
Considering the conservatives who hate taxation and the welfare state have been in power for 77 years versus the 30 or so years Labour have had, I'd love to know how the author arrived at said conclusion.
I suspect the only reason the US economy hasn't collapsed yet under the weight of it is computers have dramatically improved productivity.
Public debt, as a share of GDP, peaked at the end of World War II and then gradually declined until the Reagan tax cuts of the 1980s, which led to record deficits. Since then, the debt-to-GDP ratio has steadily risen, almost reaching its 1946 record in 2020. Only during the period 1996-2000, under President Bill Clinton, did this trend temporarily reverse.
and numerous other pieces from across the US spectrum
Unfortunately, what Republicans really represent – implausible spending cuts, poorly targeted tax cuts, and empty threats to push the US into default unless IRS funding is cut – can only make the long-term fiscal outlook worse.
Given there's no real core I'm happy to leave the libertarian part out and reduce to just poking fun at the notion that US conservatives are fiscal conservatives bravely trying but failing to keep their fingers in the dyke.
FWiW I'm no particular fan of the other party in the US two party system, it's about time somebody took Ben Franklin's advice and opened the field up.
Still, it's an iterative consequence of a voting system that didn't scale well that the washington system came to where it is.
Very few Republicans are libertarians.
For example, a libertarian has no issue with gay marriage.
> just poking fun at the notion that US conservatives are fiscal conservatives bravely trying but failing to keep their fingers in the dyke.
They voted against Biden's trillions in spending.
See https://www.expedia.co.uk/Leeds-Town-Hall-Leeds-City-Center....
The other difference is greater civic pride, and a different sense of aesthetics among the people who made the decisions. In absolute terms all those towns with nice old civic buildings are much richer than they were in the 19th century - but any new buildings are almost guaranteed to be hideous.
But Empire was important. There was more money concentrated in fewer British hands than ever before, or ever since. "Empire" is also a broad term: the Industrial Revolution, originating in the Midlands; steam power, which was exported globally; and of course, the slave trade, which Britain both catalysed and then worked hard to destroy. They all had their part - they were drivers and benefactors of Empire, and they all put plenty of cash into a few well meaning citizens' pockets.
Small towns that didn’t have a town hall or courthouse or other civic buildings built by the 1930s or so tend to have government structures that look like (or are in!) strip malls. Or look like cheap funeral homes.
We’re “way richer now” but all our nice buildings are from when we were “poor”. That even goes for commercial and industrial buildings. The stock of nice 5-15 story brick buildings that can be renovated into attractive apartments is basically fixed (actually, declining), because we don’t build anything that attractive and durable anymore.
Similarly, it’s sometimes worrying how much of the very-nice infrastructure in our parks (state and national, both) was built by 1930s “New Deal” programs and hasn’t seen more than maintenance since. These are treasures we still enjoy today and we haven’t seriously invested in more of them in most of a century.
Parties used to also choose their own nominees inside private conventions, but now there’s a system of primaries and caucuses that allow a complete outsider to just register with an party and earn the nomination by working outside of the party machinery. In California there’s no guarantee you can even put forward a candidate in every election below the Presidential-level because there’s only two slots in the election that are earned through an open primary, so it’s not uncommon to have two of the same party running against each other.
I'm also baffled how that is a problem in UK/US.
1. Culturally not needing ID is important. That's lessening, but certainly in my age group there's a considerable amount of people who do not want to be asked for ID because it's an infringement on their liberty.
2. Vote suppression. By choosing some documents (more likely to be held by your supporters) as valid ID, and others as not (make up any excuse) you can ensure your supporters aren't turned away at the polls while other party supporters are, this effectively disenfranchises them but you can pretend it wasn't on purpose.
I'd say the European assumption would be that there are one or two valid ID cards (a passport and a national identity card), and owning either one would be mandatory. Doesn't then disenfranchise anyone.
It's not mandatory in all European countries though. But I think it's usually mandatory that you are able to identify yourself somehow.
The main way you might be required to identify yourself in the UK is if a Police Officer says either you are suspected of a specific crime, or you are a witness to such a crime. In both cases officers are entitled to you truthfully revealing your name and address as part of investigating the crime, but they aren't entitled to see a photo ID as you may not even own such ID. If you refuse to identify yourself in either of these cases, or the officer believes your answer was deceitful, they can arrest you (which if you were a suspect was likely going to happen anyway).
There is no need in Germany to show an ID or have the ID with you, only to own an ID.
2. "Vote suppression"
Voter turnout:
Germany 2021 76,4%
UK 2019 67,3 %Allow me to rephrase that for you....
The voting ID requirement was introduced as a political tactic by the present UK government.
Pure and simple.
Don't believe me ? Look at the ID requirements. They are blatantly centered on the age-group that is known to support the Conservative party, i.e. the elderly.
For example:
Oyster photo-card (RFID travel card with your name and photo on it) .... over 60 ? Yes, you may use it as voting ID. 18–59 ? No, you may not use it as voting ID.
The over 60 card requires that your eligibility is verified before it's issued. This includes checking your name, address, and age.
The cards for younger people have no such verification process.
But effectively they could still do that at the point of use if they wanted to!
Recall, before ID was mandated, you would turn up and state your name and address which would be checked against the electoral roll by the officer.
Therefore ...
If someone 18–59 turns up with a photo Oyster card, you could, if you wanted to:
1. Check their face against the photo on the card
2. Check their name and date of birth on the card against the name and date of birth on the electoral roll.When I first voted here, as an immigrant, I took my passport to the voting station just in case someone asked.
The resistance to Photo IDs for voting really boils down to 'people of colour can't afford photo ids', and claim that the whole thing is a nefarious plot to rig elections.
That said, the recent New Years Eve fireworks display in London required photo ID to attend, and nobody complained.
why should that be seen as odd, as opposed to being civilised?
There have been attempts to introduce a national ID (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia_Card was the main one), but it keeps being rejected (and for a bunch of like healthcare and tax there's specific IDs for those).
Of course this precludes many homeless people from voting, and often from receiving other services, but order must be held in higher regards than compassion.
This is the most German statement I have ever heard.
Don't project.
Having helped homeless people and seeing many people help homeless people in Germany, I don't think I have ever heard a more stereo typing comment on Hackernews.
And if you're German (or somewhere else), I hope you have given to causes for the homeless, or organized something on your own, because talk is cheap.
really, just conservative gerrymandering.
Now it's a day at the polls and years of corruption and chaos!