Mary Reid

I promised to write more about the count on Thursday night. 

Election days are always exhausting, exhilarating and stressful all at the same time.

It's difficult to sleep the night before, and the morning starts early.  7am found me sitting outside a polling station.  Around here the tellers from the different parties are generally friendly towards each other and we exchange numbers if we don't catch them clearly.

We can never know, of course, how people have voted. We do ask for voters' numbers after they have voted so we can check them against our known supporters. Throughout the day we knock on doors and drop leaflets to remind our supporters to vote.

I probably walked a dozen miles during the day, possibly more. The weather was excellent, but by the end I had accumulated several large blisters.

The count started as soon as the polls ended at 10pm. The hall is arranged with a couple of tables for each ward.  One of the ballot boxes is emptied on to the table and the counting clerks flatten the papers out and put them in bundles of fifty.  All is done under the careful scrutiny of the candidates and their counting agents. This gives us our first glimpse of how the vote has gone.

The total number of votes cast is checked against the numbers recorded at the polling station. Then the process is repeated for the other boxes.

Next comes the interesting bit.  All the ballot papers for the ward are thrown together and then sorted.  Most people vote for a party slate of three candidates, so piles start to build up for each party.  The remaining papers have votes split between parties, or votes for only one or two candidates.  A small handful are deemed spoilt votes.

All the split and single votes are then recorded on tally sheets.  Many of the wards, like mine, had quite close results, so these votes are highly significant.

The conventional wisdom is that for each party, the first person on the ballot paper gets more votes than the others.  This is because some people think they only have one vote and so select the first one from the party they want.  This was certainly evident this year, but it was overlaid by other voting patterns - such as the voters who voted only for women, or only for candidates who live in the ward.  Sadly, candidates with ethnic minority names tended to get fewer votes than their fellow party candidates, and this applied across all the parties. They always lost out in wards which returned two councillors of one party and one of another.

Eventually the candidates' agents are called over to the Returning Officer to agree on the result.  At this stage if the numbers are close the losing agent will call for a recount. Some wards run to three recounts but at some point the Returning Officer will give a ruling. 

We had some pretty close results - only one vote between two candidates at one stage - but fortunately we did not have any tied votes as happened in 2002.

In terms of the political outcome, we saw a swing to the Conservatives across the borough, matching the national trend. There were some local variations; in Berrylands the Liberal Democrats took three seats from the Conservatives.  Previously spilt wards, like Coombe Vale and St James were taken by the Conservatives.  Other wards which Lib Dems had held before became Conservative/Lib Dem splits - Alexandra, Canbury, Old Malden.  And in Norbiton Lib Dems took one of the seats from Labour.

With so many close results everyone's nerves were on edge throughout the long night.  The actual control of the council hung on the last recount and just six votes.

And yet, people behaved throughout with courtesy to each other.  There was no jeering, which I have heard at elections elsewhere.  Losing your seat is a horrible experience, and no-one in that position, whatever their politics, should be treated with anything other than dignity.

In stark contrast, courteous is the last term I would use to describe some individuals who have posted offensive comments on both my blog and Kevin Davis's. They have used this platform anonymously to express demeaning comments about us, our colleagues and our political rivals.