Reading this story about ‘saving election night’ a few thoughts occur:

The move, backed without a vote, comes amid fears voters could wake up the day after an election not knowing who won…

Well, since the last two general elections have seen turnouts of about 60%, would it be reasonable to assume that at least approximately 40% of the electorate can’t care that much about the result?

Concern has been expressed on all sides of the house about a growing trend by electoral returning officers, for their own convenience and nobody else’s, to defer the counting of most of the constituencies, which have always been counted in the past on the night of the election, until the following day,

That is a bit snarky. I don’t automatically sympathise with returning officers, but I would have thought it was not their own convenience that was uppermost in their minds but the logistical challenge of finding enough suitable people to carry out the count properly – given that most of the best-qualified people are probably spending 12 hours manning polling stations and so  are likely to be starting the count after being awake for about 18 hours – which might account for the number of counting mistakes and consequent recounts.

By the time they gave up the count in Crawley last time round the tellers were so shagged out they could barely count their own fingers.

Aren’t all these people so desperate to ‘save election night’ just saying they don’t like change?   When you see the amount of resistance to a fairly trivial change like delaying the start of the count by eight to ten hours in some places you wonder how we are ever going to get any sort of agreement on any substantial changes.

Here is an alternative – delay all the counts until the next day, then you would still get the ‘event’ of all constituencies counting at the same time.  It might even be more of an event because those huge highlands constituencies might get a chance to start at the same time as compact urban areas.