Another administrative disaster – not allowing some people to vote after 10 pm. That will add a lot to the force of our argument when we lecture other countries on the need for western style democracy.
I wonder if the law really is so prescriptive & proscriptive – wouldn’t be at all surprising, this must be an almost unprecedented problem. Just shows how far the 24 hour culture has spread; twenty years ago, even ten, people would have looked at you uncomprehendingly if you had suggested that there could be queues outside the polling stations at that hour. A good proportion of voters would already have been in bed. Our worries have all been focused on the problem of getting people to turn up at all, queues being extremely unlikely at any hour.
But most of all I suspect that Jack Straw did not help by bowing to pressure from the political classes (including the media) to have all counts done immediately the polls close, except in exceptional circumstances. With the extreme pressure on local government budgets during this recession, the temptation to pare costs must have been compelling. Why not use fewer polling stations, covering a larger area; why print ballot papers in numbers sufficient to provide one for every voter when turnouts are so low these days; why not use fewer staff, & start to pull some of them back to base in the evening to begin the arduous procedures for counting & checking postal votes? Etc, etc
