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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.
> 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.
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.)
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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 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.
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.
Those were the days ... when we actually had general elections ...
We've had elections, we've just lacked competent opposition :(
Too many British people are suckers. That's what I see in the last several General Elections. They allowed themselves to believe that even though the Tories are the problem, maybe more Tories is the answer, that shouldn't have passed the laugh test.
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)
It isn't too much of a stretch to say the UK has been in continual decline since since the end of general elections. Literally - 1920s was the point where the British empire started coming apart at the seams. First they got into WWI and set up the conditions for WWII, misjudged everything, managed to exhaust the reserves of their empire and then retreated to their miserable and godforsaken island home with relative grace over the rest of the century.
Maybe if they'd had good general elections they'd have made different decisions around WWI and averted all that.
C Northcote Parkinson, in "The Law and the Profits", pegs the turning point for Britain was 1909, when the taxation and socialist welfare state emerged.
https://www.amazon.com/Law-Profits-Cyril-Northcote-Parkinson...
I know the Victorians loved to exaggerate the scale of their monuments... but even so that image of the town hall takes the cake!
It actually is quite a grand building (I was born in Leeds!)
See https://www.expedia.co.uk/Leeds-Town-Hall-Leeds-City-Center....
Civic buildings built in the 18th and 19th centuries in Britain are considerably more impressive than their contemporary equivalents anywhere else in the World, thanks to the British Empire being at its peak at that time.
Part of it may be the empire thing, but in the US even small town post offices from 1920 or earlier are luxurious by modern standards. We’d never ever spend what it’d take to build them like that now.
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.
I am not convinced you can attribute it to the Empire, a lot of it was in industrial towns that probably gained more from the industrial revolution than the Empire.
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.
While that's true and Leeds Town Hall does look a fair bit like the picture it's definitely quite significantly smaller
The proportions seem a little off but it is hand drawn.
On the other hand, most elections in Canada have turned into one week election, officially 6 days of advanced poll and 1 day of election, and the result has been greater participation.
Always amazed how different countries do democracy and many people think it is the only way to do. E.g. in the UK there is much resistance to needing an ID to vote, while here in Germany we've been voting 70 years with IDs. And we always vote on Sundays, which many Americans could not believe. Amazed about the many different ways.
We've found something that Germans do on Sundays? I guess there really is an exception to every rule ;)
Most Germans do car washing on Sundays ;-)
There's no British ID card, and some people have no photographic identification (passport, driving licence) or don't routinely carry any. Also, voter ID fraud very rarely happens, and is detectable when it does happen - when you vote, the ask for your name and address. Voter ID was recently introduced and now many people are turned away without being able to vote - which is far more likely to change the result of an election than ID fraud.
Being Germans, the idea of someone not being able to identify themselves is inconceivable, worse even; illegal.
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.
> Voter ID was recently introduced
really, just conservative gerrymandering.
Poland also votes on Sundays (although some referenda have been 2-day affairs). And I'm pretty much sure, it was never allowed to vote here without an ID.
I'm also baffled how that is a problem in UK/US.
For ID, two intersecting forces in the UK (and I'd imagine the US is somewhat similar but not the same)
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.
Same in Spain, and there is a single national ID that everybody is required to have, so there is no problem of rejecting voters based on ideological differences.
Very interesting indeed. Here in the Netherlands, we've had ID requirements for voting since forever. And even though we don't vote on Sundays (I think it's always a working day), our turnout rate is similar (slightly higher even) compared to Germany. I guess there's more at play here.
Here in AU, there's no ID required, and we always vote on Saturdays (though pre-poll stations are open most days of the week, and there's a bunch of other exceptions for the NT due to remoteness).
It varies wildly sometimes within the same country like here inside America. I’ve been voting by mail my entire adult life, but a lot of people only really started to do that with the pandemic but it didn’t stick everywhere, nor was it popular everywhere.
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.
> in the UK there is much resistance to needing an ID to vote
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.
While I do agree that the current government's policy was designed to suppress votes (Rees Mogg basically admitted it), the different treatment of Oyster cards makes sense.
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.
The UK is odd when it comes to IDs, you don't need to carry one around at all. That it's easy to live outside the system is touted as a reason why so many people try to break into the country from France.
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.
> The UK is odd when it comes to IDs, you don't need to carry one around at all.
why should that be seen as odd, as opposed to being civilised?
I can't speak to other parts of the Commonwealth, but Australia and New Zealand also don't require photo IDs, you only really need them if you're young and want to go to age-restricted venues (e.g. bars) or buy alcohol (or similar things that have age restrictions around them). Usually you just use your drivers license, but you can also get proof of age cards (or you used to, not sure what they do now with phones, maybe there's an alternative).
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).
>General elections in Britain were once weeks-long affairs of corruption and chaos.
Now it's a day at the polls and years of corruption and chaos!