Election results

As they say on the telly, the results have been counted and verified and I can announce that the winner is...

Actually I don't want to talk about winners and losers, it seems crass, vulgar, cheap.

Instead I want to talk about other results, for example me feeling really, really tired is a result of the election. Hundreds of people across the county, and thousands of people across Britain will have been feeling tired over the weekend as a result of last week's election.

The reason being that an election can't take place without staff: there are the presiding officers and poll clerks, who sit in the polling stations for 15 hours (6am to 10pm) to make sure that the people have a chance to vote.  There are more than 40,000 polling stations across the country, so that's over 80,000 people who put in a really long day in the name of democracy.

Then there are the counters, who have to record every vote to make sure that the right person gets the job they're elected to.  I'm not sure how many counters there are, but there were a few hundred gathered in the Whitehaven Sports Centre from 10pm on Thursday until after 6pm on Friday, counting the Copeland votes. I know that there are 326 districts in England, there are another 73 constituencies in Scotland, 22 council areas in Wales and 18 constituencies in Northern Ireland.

That's 439 administrative centres, of varying types.  If each one of them employed just 150 counters (many of the larger ones could've needed more) that would be 65,850 people counting votes across the United Kingdom.  Many of them doing it into the early hours of Friday morning. Not Sunderland though. 

The point I want to make is that it takes a huge number of people, working very long hours to enable people to vote, and that's just one more reason why everyone eligible should take the opportunity to stand up and be counted.

And just for fun: