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Post by patricklondon on Mar 19, 2016 8:57:35 GMT
Throughout the day, they ask voters "can you come back to count ballots when the polls close?" That would be impossible with us, where all the ballot boxes are collected together and the whole thing is supervised by a phalanx of the professional civil servants as well as the candidates' observers. They usually ask for volunteers from among their own office staff to take on the various temporary jobs for the day (with some nominal extra pay, of course). I got to volunteer once when I had a temp job in the local council's finance departmen, and ended up as a polling station clerk for most of the day. For the sorting and counting they traditionally used to ask the local banks if their tellers would like an extra few hours' night work. I'm assuming these days banks don't have the same numbers of people skilled at counting and tallying thousands of bits of paper, so I don't know what they do. Maybe they still have enough skilled people on their own staffs. I don't see them trusting any old Joe Public, especially in the kind of constituency that wants to make a thing out of being the first with their result.
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Post by tod2 on Mar 19, 2016 11:01:11 GMT
bjd - Yes of course, I forgot about that. They are just voting for another leader of the same persuasian. I would think those who did not want to vote simply left the paper blank but have still been crossed off at the polling station as having voted..?
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Post by htmb on Mar 19, 2016 11:56:46 GMT
Our ballots are scanned by machine and the vote is automatically recorded.
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Post by tod2 on Mar 19, 2016 17:51:19 GMT
My late father-in-law liked to pull one's leg....probably because he was a Yorkshireman. Anyhow, he told his wife that he wanted her to vote for a certain candidate and that if she did not he would find her voting slip to check. Do you know she actually believed him, the poor woman.
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Post by mossie on Mar 20, 2016 16:20:29 GMT
He came from a generation where there were memories of that sort of knowledge, farm workers in tied cottages and mill and factory workers in their employers properties were told who to vote for, or else they were out on the street without a job.
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Post by htmb on Mar 20, 2016 19:42:49 GMT
So true. Thanks for that reminder, Mossie.
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