Highland General Election votes to be counted overnight

Following a period of public consultation over the count for the General Election, the Returning Officer for the three Highland UK parliamentary constituencies has decided to count the votes in each constituency overnight.

Alistair Dodds, Chief Executive of The Highland Council, consulted with political parties, community councils and the general public to establish their views on the merits of an overnight count as opposed to counting the votes the next day.

The two main reasons for considering scrapping an overnight count were the introduction of new processes to prevent postal voting fraud, which can add up to three hours to the count, and consideration of the staff, who have to count the votes into the early hours of the morning.
The volume of postal votes handled in recent elections has grown dramatically. Now identity checks are carried out using dedicated IT systems, which scan statements and compare the signatures and dates of birth electronically.  The rules allow for postal voting to be returned to any polling station in the constituency or direct to the Returning Officer any time up to the close of poll.

Despite these issues, the majority of responses favoured an overnight count and Mr Dodds has decided to maintain the status quo.

The counts will be held at the following venues:

Caithness Sutherland and Easter Ross:  Assembly Rooms, Wick
Ross Skye and Lochaber: Dingwall Leisure Centre
Inverness Nairn and Badenoch and Strathspey: Inverness Leisure, Bught Park, Inverness

The General Election must be held on or before 3 June, 2010, which marks the end of the five-year term of office of the current Government. 

Polling will take place between 7 am and 10 pm and then the ballot boxes will be taken to the three venues where teams of count staff will be waiting to count the votes, commencing as soon as possible after 10 pm.

Mr Dodds said: “Given the additional security measures required to check postal votes, there was an argument for considering delaying the counting of votes until the following day. However, following consultation on this matter, I have decided to conduct an overnight count.   The public should be aware that it will take longer than usual to declare the result.”

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