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Comment by olddustytrail | Hacker News Reader

There will probably be another General Election in the UK this year. This chooses which party will be in government (almost certainly Labour this time) and who therefore will be Prime Minister (almost certainly Keir Starmer).

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.

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> That's why I don't understand why in US presidential elections, it takes weeks to get the result.

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).

In 2020 it was genuinely not clear what would actually happen in January 6, when the electoral college votes are officially tabulated. It was not impossible that they could have been faced with "alternate" electors from some states. That likely would have been illegal, but since that had never been tested, the interpretation of the law is up for grabs.

We have a weird multi stage counting process and only the final one is truly definitive.

In France, polling stations close at 6pm except in a some large cities where they close at 8pm.

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).

The other thing is that polling is quick and convenient. Your polling station is usually within easy walking distance, is open 07:00-22:00, and IME you're usually only queuing for a single digit of minutes if at all. There's also postal and proxy voting. On the contrary I hear reports from the US of having to queue for a long time, or working people worrying that they won't be able to get to the stations in time. Though I imagine this varies a lot by state

It usually doesn’t take weeks. Mail-in voting added weeks to count. In normal circumstances main-in is for deployed troops and citizens living overseas, who normally are a small minority.

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.

> normal circumstances main-in is for deployed troops and citizens living overseas, who normally are a small minority.

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 Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act guarantees the right of US citizens living abroad to vote in federal elections in the state they previously resided in (not sure about US citizens who never resided in a state or DC)

Mail in on the U.K. is for a wel or two, but the envelope has to arrive by a certain date/time before the election.

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.

Mail-in isn't inherently slow, Oregon has been primarily Mail-in since 2000 and have almost everything counted on election night. The difference is that Oregon only accepts ballots that arrive by election day vs. postmarked by election day (plus some hard cutoff) like many states use.

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...

Arrive by Election Day is a weird rule to use (even if it makes your life simpler) since you’re not in charge of when the post office delivers the mail, which makes mail in ballots an unreliable voting mechanism.

Which is why Oregon says not to mail ballot when close to Election Day, and instead drop them orr at locations where they collect ballots. Places like libraries with secure drop offs.

I can’t find anywhere on the State of Oregon election website that defines what safety margin is acceptable to be considered outside “close to Election day”.

Oregon resident, they say at least a week. 10 days is the recommendation

Postmarked is also weird since that's open-ended. There are stories of bits of mail or even mail crates that get lost for a decade or more

This is no longer the case in Oregon: https://katu.com/news/politics/ballots-mailed-by-election-da...

To a Brit, the idea that an outgoing US president remains in office for weeks even if their defeat is confirmed (and sometimes even accepted!) in hours is a little odd. That's quite a bit of time to make decisions their successor will find it difficult to reverse, whether in good faith or otherwise.

(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.)

It used to be four months now it's two. 19th century it could take weeks or months to tally the vote. Other big big difference is in the US legislative and executive branches are separate and in Britain they are not. Your Prime minister is a member of parliament. US presidents often aren't members of either congress or the presidency.

The system also tends to be centered around the idea of good faith which admittedly is a bit tattered.

There are historical reasons for this. It used to be even longer (March 4th, changed by 20th Amendment).

Many of our problems result from solutions to the problems of 200 years ago.

> Many of our problems result from solutions to the problems of 200 years ago.

Now you sound like a Unix user.

> To a Brit, the idea that an outgoing US president remains in office for weeks even if their defeat is confirmed

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.

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