I see that vote counting across UK starts tonight after polling ends....except my constituency where they arent bothering to start counting until friday.....now how can that work??? >(.....will they hold the result until my area is counted?

I guess it depends on whether the result is so close that your constituency will hold the balance of power.

Of course they will hold the result until ALL the constituencies are counted ...some constituencies traditionally want to be the first to have their results in and therefore counting starts as the polling stations close.   This year the polling stations are closing at 10pm (they always used to close at 9pm) - and of course there have been boundary changes to constituencies.

Some returning officers have decided that it will be far better to start the count at 6am tomorrow morning ...but by tomorrow evening, they will know which party has the balance of power - but it could be so close that we may not know until Saturday!

Until the actual results are known - it is still business by the outgoing government!

Sometimes the result becomes obvious long before the final few constituencies counts are in so they can make an announcement early eg the landslide victories for one party or another. This time they are expecting it to be much closer so it is likely that more if not all of the constituency results will need to be in before they can declare one way or the other.
If it is a hung parliament - ie no outright winner then the current government will be asked if they can form a government and that's when all the backroom politics come in to play for coalitions etc, the others don't get asked until Gordon Brown resigns, so it could be a few days before we get a result in that case.

And some constituencies take a long time to get results through - like the Scottish Isles. :-D

If it is a large rural area it can take a while for all the boxes to arrive and 'normal procedure' is that they don't start counting ANY box till ALL boxes for a particular seat are in the same place.
In a town it can take about 5 mins for a box to arrive against 5 hours in very remote areas.
Don't forget the 're-counts' which can take an age, one ward in our Boro election had 5 recounts which took a good hour or more (total votes cast about 1200) so think of the time for a MPs seat (20,000/30,000+ votes)
Chris

I read on the beeb website that one consituency has had their actual polling deferred until the 27th May due to the death of one of the candidates.

yes i saw that too .....so will we all be kept in suspense on the results until the 27th? Lokis mum?

Near our area, they can't vote at all because their MP is John Berkow, and as he is the speaker for the House of Commons, he ain't going nowhere.  Doesn't seem fair, especially as his reputation has been tarnished somewhat over the past year!  Democracy at its most democratic.

sorry but you are wrong, tradition says that the speaker is unopposed but this year there is an election for his seat, Nigel Farage is standing for ukip and i think there is a couple more as well. If Berkow looses he will be out and therefore will obviously not be speaker.
Chris

>they can't vote at all because their MP is John Berkow, and as he is the speaker for the House of Commons, he ain't going nowhere.

Nigel Farage is certainly standing against John Berkow - he was campaigning whenthe light plane he was in crashed this morning and he and the pilot were taken to hospital.

No, I wasn't accurate.  However, major parties ensure the Speaker is re-elected:-

"Speakers still stand in general elections. They are generally unopposed by the major political parties, who will not field a candidate in the Speaker's constituency - this includes the original party they were a member of. During a general election, Speakers do not campaign on any political issues but simply stand as 'the Speaker seeking re-election'.  - from government website.

Kind of a 'pretend' ballot in the Buckingham area.

We have over  43 parishes with one or two polling stations sometimes 3. The first in get counted first and each polling statin in a constituancy will be counted together but some constituancies are huge like Meon Valley. I was 30 miles away from the count and we had three polling stations in one village. We had queues but cleared them all and finished about 11 pm after me getting up at 4:30am. I got home around midnight after dropping off the boxs and the count was in full swing.

District elections were counted Friday and declared pm Friday but some counts are huge. Some do decide to count friday because there are so may votes and a certain constuituancy will be counted early the next day, postals were counted a day early and some postals were given in on the day - it was a cock up as we had 1 presiding offer 2 poll clers per ward and no breaks in 16 hours. We just called the officer to sit in whilst a pee break was in order and ate when we could. All in all a strange day with over 78% voting and a lot off young people.