It was essential that we were there to view the verification of both the London Assembly ballot papers for the Bexley & Bromley Constituency and the papers for Shortlands ward, particularly the latter as it was going to be our only source of polling district voting data. We’d arrived at 8am but there was some confusion over our security armbands at the door and we weren’t allowed into the vast counting hall at ExCel in London’s Docklands until past 9, where one of the counting teams had already started counting the Shortlands ballots.
Our delayed entry felt disastrous. We blinked and tried to find our bearings amid the chaos of 204,000 ballot papers being counted for the Bexley & Bromley constituency. The ballot boxes were stored in ambulant cages in random order, as we suspected later, organised in this way to keep us on our toes. Contrary to some people’s preconceptions, you don‘t swan around at the count looking urbane and smiling for the press. You’re there to work, especially if you are in a small party. You need sharp wits and flat, comfortable shoes. You also need the sharp elbows of a Dulwich Mum. Representatives from one party crowded around the verification table on the first day to block access from anyone else; the following day one prominent local politician used his unique skills to great effect and trundled from table to table to obscure everyone’s view.
The hall was set out in a U shape with counters in teams at long tables and prospective politicians and our count teams at times literally running to the box openings on a nod and a wink from eagle-eyed team members placed at strategic points in the hall. It’s important to get a good view of the ballot being sorted in order to tally an accurate sample of how the voting is going and to make sure that, for example, a Conservative vote is not placed on top of a pile of LibDem votes by mistake. It’s a long day for the counting teams too, and mistakes are bound to happen in this important but mindless manual task.
Our Shortlands count took place at the end of a day of verification. Everyone was already tired and an intense silence fell over the one counting table as the counting team got to work, the team from Reform hovering as Trump intimidated Hillary until it was clear that they hadn’t done well and they all went off to the pub.
As expected the Conservative candidate won, followed by Labour and I took a reasonable third place with about 13% of the vote. After hearing the news from the Returning Officer, we took the stage for the official pronouncement of the results, shook hands and went home.
Congratulations to Gemma. She seems lovely, despite being a Conservative.
The London Assembly count took place the following day. Candidates and their agents were called to each of the tables throughout the day to reach a decision on disputed ballot papers. If, for example, a voter starts to put an X in one box but then has a change of heart and puts their mark in another, candidates are allowed to argue the case for their team. There were plenty of spoiled ballot papers with more than one cross; some people wrote “none of these” or an insulting treatise about “all politicians;” “Free Palestine” appeared on others and, at my count, there were four erect penises and one pair of boobs. All discounted. Plenty of people didn’t make any choice, which does make me wonder why they they bothered putting their blank ballot paper into the box.
You’ll see from the above result that my votes plus the votes for the Labour candidate in Shortlands added up to just more than those of the Conservative candidate’s vote and some people are cross about this. They ask us why we stand when we know we’re unlikely to win. They tell us that Liberal Democrats standing for elections only prolongs the rule of the Conservatives.
It’s true that IF the LibDems hadn’t stood and IF everyone who voted for me had instead voted for Labour they would have won by a few votes. But you’ll notice that those are big, presumptuous IFs. It’s really arrogant in my view to state, as some in the Labour party do, that the LibDems somehow take their votes, as if all non-Tory votes are their entitlement. As if all disenchanted Tories would, like Nathalie Elphicke MP, suddenly change their minds and flock to Labour. We have no way of telling which way our votes would have gone.
There are lots of reasons for our party candidates to stand in seats where they might not win, and they are the same as for the other parties: we stand in order to give people disenchanted with the offerings of the other parties an alternative; to add our Liberal Democrat principles to shape the debate; to allow people to send a message to the party of their normal affiliation; to gauge support in the area with a possible view to campaigning there in the future; to restore our visibility in a ward where we hadn’t actively campaigned for some time; to stand a local candidate (me) who knows the area. It’s not just about the winning, you see.
I understand fully about tactical voting – despite one particularly vociferous and aggressive person on X telling me I don’t (I’m a LibDem candidate, FGS) -but it is not for us political parties to impose less choice and fewer alternatives on the electorate, who are by now pretty well clued-up about how to vote most effectively under our present system. We Liberal Democrats offer a choice. Let the voters decide. Surely that’s the point of democracy.
And the logical conclusion of imposing tactical voting is having only two parties, no doubt the preferred option of the Big Two. So we continue to go from Conservative to Labour back to Conservative under First Past the Post, with each one undoing the work of the previous government like a game of ping pong with the voters as the ball. What a waste of time and resources.
No-one asks Labour to stand down, so why should we, particularly in seats where we are potentially stronger than Labour? And the only way of finding this out is to stand and campaign, often over many years and many election cycles.
I felt pretty drained after the excitement and stress of the campaign and it’s taken me a couple of weeks to get back to my normal life. But I would not have missed this opportunity to make my voice heard.