Election Tally

A person goes to a polling station, finds a booth, writes their voting preferences on a ballot, folds it, and places it into the ballot box. When voting ends, the boxes are sealed and sent to a count center.

A tally is an unofficial count of votes conducted by party members, candidates, and other volunteers. A tally gives early results before the official count is done and shows detailed information on voting patterns, such as turnout and votes in specific areas, details that will be lost in the final official count.

There are many people and roles involved in a tally but I’ll focus on just a few; the marker, the runner, the auditor, the caller, the aggregator and the coordinator.

# Marker

The goal of a marker is to calculate the tally for each box of an area. A marker does this by standing in front of the table where count staff for the area are working.

A table in the count center has two count staff. One of the count staff will up-end a ballot box into the middle of a table and begin separating the votes.

The marker should always start by writing their name and the box number on the tally sheet. She then watches the two count staff unfold the ballots and lay them out. The marker watches each ballot as it is unfolded by the count staff. She draws a vertical line next to the name of the candidate who received the number 1 vote. She continues, using the “gate” tally method of counting, to group number 1s into a batch of five votes. At the end, the tally sheet is full and represents the tally for a full box.

Tracking the number 1s from both stacks can be a lot of work for one person. To lighten the load and decrease the chance of error, a second marker can work the same table. The second marker will often be from another party. In a typical single election, there will only be one kind of ballot so each of the count staff will take about half from the pile and each marker will tally the number 1s of each “half box”.

Alternatively, it may be a two ballot election. For example, both the local and European elections took place at the same time. In this case, the count staff may first take only local election ballots, in which case both markers are doing a half box, or one of the count staff takes only local ballots and the other takes only European ballots, in which case each marker is doing a full box but for different elections.

The half box tally highlights the need for cooperation between parties. There’s no rule saying parties must cooperate but everyone is interested in a fair result and the entire tally process likely would not have enough volunteers for all areas if they worked alone, incentivizing everyone from different parties to work together.

However, there is one important rule that markers must remember. Markers should never touch a ballot. Only the count staff are allowed to touch a ballot.

Markers must also understand the rules for what counts as a spoiled vote. Common causes of spoiled votes include 1. the ballot is blank or not clearly marked, 2. the numbers aren’t sequential starting from 1, 3. there are multiple number 1s, or 4. there’s an identifying mark of any kind, such as a signature.

In simultaneous elections, such as locals and Europeans, spoilage can happen if people continue the number sequence from the first ballot to the second, instead of starting again from 1. The marker should also tally the spoils for each box.

Once a tally sheet is complete, either a half box or full box, the total is calculated. The count staff will declare their total. Ideally, the tally and count totals are the same but in reality, they may differ a little. That’s fine. Tallies are just quick estimates and don’t have to be perfect.

# Runner

The completed tally sheets are collected by a runner. The runner’s job is to take all of the tally sheets and bring them to where they’re being collected. Typically, there will be one group of people working on the completed tally sheets for all areas in a constituency. The runner needs to know which areas belong to which constituency and take the completed tallies to the appropriate constituency group. This can be difficult, particularly at the start, as groups where the tally sheet needs to go may not be labelled with their constituency and a runner will need to familiarize himself with where he needs to hand the completed tally sheet. When he finds the right group, he hands the completed tally sheet to an auditor.

# Auditor

An auditor interprets and organizes tally sheets to get the box tallies. She double-checks the sheets for errors, adds half boxes together to get full box tallies, tries to decipher markers’ handwriting and asks runners to get clarification from the marker when needed. There are lots of ways that tally sheets might have errors. Markers might have summed incorrectly, written the wrong box number, marked a half box as a full box or vice versa, or any number of other errors. Once the auditor is reasonably confident a box tally is ready, the completed tally sheet is put into the inbox of the caller.

# Caller

The caller works with a group of people called the aggregators who enter the called numbers into a spreadsheet. The caller calls aloud the tally of each box, one candidate at a time. After the candidates, he calls out the number of spoils and tally total. The aggregators then call their total. There can be a small difference between the total of the tally and the computer calculated total but if there’s a large difference, the tally sheet is returned to the auditor for her to look for what could be wrong. Once the sheet has been read and found acceptable by the aggregators, the caller signs the sheet and places it on his outbox so it’s not read again.

The caller has a second job. Candidates, election directors and reporters will want to know the results as soon as they come in. Sometimes they can become overexcited and loudly chatter about who they think is going to win, making it difficult for the aggregators to hear the caller. When this happens, the caller will need to tell people to move along away from the tally area so the aggregators can do their job.

# Aggregator

The goal of an aggregator is to collect the tallies for all boxes. The tallies are stored in a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet will have been prepared ahead of time to have the list of all candidates for the area from which they’re accepting a tally. As the caller calls out the tally for a box, the aggregator enters the data.

Candidates and reporters will be eager to know results and may ask the aggregators for updates. The aggregators have a few options here. They can tell the current state of the tally but this doesn’t really scale because another person will likely ask immediately after. Better strategies are to make regular print outs for people to see, or even better, share a link or QR code to the live spreadsheet the aggregator is working on so people can see the results as they’re coming in.

There will usually be aggregators from each party for each area. Each will be independently recording the same tally for their own records. At the end of a box call, one of the aggregators might need to double-check a data point in case she made a mistake. When this happens, they can ask the caller or other aggregators to repeat the tally for a box. When the spreadsheets are complete with the tallies for all box tallies digitized, aggregators should work together, across parties to check for errors in the data they’ve entered into their spreadsheet.

# Coordinator

The person responsible for making sure that the spreadsheet was prepared ahead of time, and responsible for almost everything else during the tally, is the coordinator. The coordinator is at the heart of the entire tally. There’s usually one for each party, ideally working cross-party to standardize tally sheets and to ensure everything runs smoothly. The coordinator needs to make sure everyone knows where they should be, what they’re going to be doing, how to do it, and has everything they need to do it. They may also be responsible for setting up communication so that volunteers can get in contact if anything is wrong, and setting up wider communication channels with other coordinators to work at a national level.

# Future

There’s still a lot that can be done to modernize the tally process. Rather than a pen and paper tally, there’s nothing to stop people from having an app and tapping each number one, or even better, using photos and machine vision to collect not just the number 1s, but all transfers too. These systems would remove the need for most other roles and provide instantaneous and more granular results but people are often reluctant to adopt new methods so the manual pen and paper process will be sticking around for a while.

The ideal we should strive for is to have all tally information available to the public instead of just political insiders. Tallies can bring together volunteers from all backgrounds to give early and highly detailed information on votes. This helps candidates and organizations analyze voting patterns, improve their understanding of the voters, and better prepare for the next election. Tallies can be exciting, promote transparency, and improve trust in the democratic process. If you’re interested in participating in a tally, contact your preferred party close to election time, letting them know you’d like to help.