It’s not over till it’s over: the count, 3 May 13

(I wrote this post for the HISIMP NEWS, the newsletter of Histon and Impington Parish Council, which is being delivered this week)

It’s 8am and you’ve slept really well. It’s the first time you haven’t had an early start for some time but you know it’s not over yet because today’s the day of the count.

Nobody who hasn’t stood for elected office and seriously intended to be successful can imagine the dawn to dusk and beyond hard work which goes into an election campaign and the peaks and troughs of elation and despair which go with it. It all leads up to election day itself which doesn’t finish until 10pm. That’s the night you go to bed exhausted knowing that it’s all over bar the shouting.

For candidates for Cottenham, Histon and Impington (CH&I) in the recent county council elections, and there were lots of them, the count took place at the South Cambs District Council offices in Cambourne. And for some reason the mobile reception there isn’t terribly good so keeping in touch with the outside world is a bit touch and go. But to its credit South Cambs does provide open access broadband but that doesn’t help with ‘normal’ phone and text.

The hall itself was busy from the start. Lots of political rosettes: yellow and red and blue plus a few with the purple of the Independents. But only one from UKIP. Maybe the people of South Cambs aren’t fertile UKIP territory.

Plenty of nervousness too. Parties of the coalition expecting to be punished which is normal for elections in mid-government and those outside hoping to take advantage. And plenty of scrapping too within the coalition with Lib Dems and Tories eyeing each other up with no love lost locally.

Just to build tension they don’t start counting straight away but do ‘verification’ to ensure that all the votes put into the boxes on election day arrive at the count. It’s at this time that ‘election agents’ keep watch to see what’s coming out of individual boxes. Eagle eyed they watch as every ballot paper is opened and they keep score with their five barred gates on little notepads. A bit like train spotting. And then the rumours start: the Tory leader is looking vulnerable, Lib Dems might lose a couple, Bourn’s looking close. It won’t change the result of course but it has us all getting excited.

And with CH&I so complex the election agents can’t discern any voting trend and we all get rather glum. I’m chatting to Mike Mason (the Independent) and Huw Jones (Labour) and we keep muttering ‘impossible to call’.

Once verification is complete the council officers doing the work take a break and we help ourselves to coffee (instant) and biscuits. There’s no free lunches at South Cambs. Then counting begins.

That’s pretty simple for most divisions where it’s just one councillor being returned. But in CH&I it’s more complicated so we have a staged count to rack up the tension.

First they count the votes of those who voted for two people from the same party or for just one person. That’s pretty straight forward and seems to result in the Lib Dems being ahead by a whisker with the Independent trailing.

Then another cunning tension building device: all the votes which went to people who voted cross party get tallied up on big spreadsheets and there are 3 on the go at the same time. Mike leads on each sheet and keeps scoring 50 but will there be enough sheets for him to get into contention? And as he does so who will he drag through into second place?

Just occasionally someone has voted cross party and not for Mike. You get bizarre combinations of UKIP with Labour or Lib Dem, you get people voting for two women or two from the same village across party. And just a few times you got voters going for Huw and me; we reckoned that was the Welsh vote coming out.

In the end: there were enough spreadsheets for Mike to get elected. In fact he topped the poll and I came second. Elsewhere the Tory leader did lose his seat, the Lib Dems did lose a couple including one by a single vote and Bourn was close but what had been Tory before its councillor defected to UKIP was once again blue.

Then at about 3pm it was all over and life slowly returned to normal. Elation for some, despair for others. But no more early mornings, no more canvassing, no more stuffing leaflets through letterboxes. At least not until this time next year.