Register to Vote

Time's against us, so I'll be brief.  If you want to vote in the UK general election, but haven't registered to vote, you've got today to do it.  Don't leave it till the last minute - remember last time when the website went down because everyone tried to register?  Go to https://www.gov.uk/register-to-vote and register.

I do believe that voting is important, regardless of whether you vote for someone or if you turn up and deliberately spoil your ballot paper as a protest, because we are very fortunate to live in a place and time where citizens have the ability to vote.  There are still countries in the world where voting isn't possible, voting is restricted to certain people, or where the voting process is rigged.

Plus as one of the people will be sat in a polling station all day on election day helping voters, it makes my day go a lot quicker if people show up!

Don't forget also if you've moved house that you need to sort out your vote with the local council, otherwise you might be eligible to vote somewhere across the country.

For more about the rare breed that sits in polling stations, check out my 5 things you might not know about working in a polling station post :)

Surprise - Election!

Abandoning the post I was writing (don't worry, it'll appear soon enough) I shamelessly leap onto a topic that is currently trending on Twitter.

The UK Prime Minister, Theresa May, has stated her intention to hold a general election in early June, in an effort to increase her parties majority as they start the Brexit negotiations.  I've always made an effort to be non-political in this blog and to not favour any particular party, so I'm certainly not going to comment on who should get your (or my) vote.

But it's excellent timing.  May has suffered from the accusation of being made prime minister without the public voting for her.  The main opposition party, Labour, appear to be in disarray.  The Liberal Democrats have not recovered from their time as the Conservatives junior partner in government.  Reasons for voting UKIP are fading as their main drive - to leave the EU - is already being delivered by the Conservatives.  And the SNP are as big a force in Westminster as they can ever hope to be, the best they can manage is to maintain their current numbers.

That said, it's still going to be eight busy weeks until the election (assuming that the House of Commons votes for the early election).  Jeremy Corbyn seems to garner a significant amount of support from segments of the public, at odds with much of the Labour MPs at Westminster. And this is a significant U-turn from May, away from her past statements that there wouldn't be an election until 2020.

Nevertheless, the latest polls indicate a huge swathe of Labour seats potentially changing hands and going to the Conservative party in June, giving May the majority she wants to have the freedom to push hard on Brexit.

All of which brings me to thinking that it's a good time to mention this blog post about 5 things you might not know about working at polling stations, and this video about news on polling day :)

Elections - 5 things about working in a polling station you might not know

Attribution: Alex Lee (originally posted to Flickr as Voting in Hackney) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

For those in the UK, it's nearly election day.  On Thursday 7th May 2015 we'll get the opportunity to vote and decide who should be our MPs for the next few years.

I'm considering going to bed early and then getting up early to catch some of the results as they are announced - looking at the Telegraph website it appears as though most of the results come out from about 3am onwards.

I've always been interested in the elections (lots of statistics - I love numbers!), but this one is different for me, because it's the first one in a few years that I'm not working in a polling station - usually I'm one of those people sat behind a table in a polling station, dishing out ballot papers and ensuring that the poll goes smoothly.  Here's a few interesting bits about working in a polling station:

(Disclaimer: The below is purely based on my past knowledge and experiences.  It is not sanctioned by the Electoral Commission, or other authorities, as current, common or good practice)

5 - It's a long day

In each polling station, there is a minimum of a Poll Clerk and a Presiding Officer.  The Presiding Officer is generally there by 6.15am, to get ready for the election starting at 7am, and quite often the night before they'll stop by the station to make sure that the keys provided actually work.

We'll work through to 10pm, when polls close, and then do the paperwork, which takes about 20-30 minutes - quite often some of the paperwork we can start before polls close (labelling envelopes etc), but there's always still a good amount to do after 10 with packing the station away, and just making sure everything is done correctly.

After that the Presiding Officer gets to take the votes and paperwork to a counting centre (for me it was always one or other of the local leisure centres).  It's not unusual to get home after midnight if you've had a polling station some distance away from the leisure centre.

Don't feel too sorry for us, though - there is an elections team backing us up who coordinate the whole thing, have been planning it for weeks and have to do even longer hours, getting the ballot boxes, voting slips and paperwork out to the polling staff, issuing training, handling problems from several hundred polling stations as they arise, and then afterwards they'll be in the counting stations checking on everything at that end.

4 - When polls open, you can vote.

This sounds obvious, but even though we're there bright and early, sometimes it's a rush to be 100% completely ready for 7am.  We have a lot of different papers to organise and arrange, signs to put up, booths, tables, chairs etc to arrange, so the staff may get the bare minimum up by 7.00am and work on after 7.00am getting the rest ready, so please be understanding that if you do stroll in at 7.01am it might just take the polling staff a few seconds to double-check the exact procedure for issuing a ballot paper to you - the absolute last thing anyone wants to do is get something wrong!

I do recall on one occasion having a problem in that we didn't have an electricity connection at the time of polls opening (so you couldn't see a thing inside the polling station), and the first vote of the day was actually cast outside the station by the lights of the Poll Clerks' car - not wholly ideal but it worked, and to be fair to the elections team they were great in getting a chap out to sort things out as soon as possible.

3 - We can't leave.

This again is fairly obvious, and mostly isn't a problem (in a small station look out for the carrier bag of food and drink that the staff have brought in!).  That said, when doing the elections by teatime the staff are probably ready for a decent spot of dinner.  For me this generally involves a slightly odd phone call to the nearest pub or takeaway to the polling station, which goes like this:
 "Hello, Red Lion."
 "Hello there, um I've got a bit of an odd request.  Can you see the polling station just outside on the grass down the street?"
 "Er - yes, why?"
 "I'm in it.  Any chance you could deliver a burger?"

2 - It's not actually our day job.

We don't do elections every day (our day jobs may even be quite different - for me, for example, it's very rare that I get to deal directly with the general public), and so we might have to take a second now and again to confirm the right procedure for a certain issue.  However, we do get a handbook for polling station staff which covers just about anything that we need to do, and staff are encouraged to studied these beforehand so that if we do get a difficult situation we can quickly consult the book and take action.

That means that there's a good likelihood that the staff in your station were probably sat in bed the night before the election reading the handbook.

1 - We love you voters to stop by!

I'm certainly not going to suggest who you should vote for, but I will just say that it's great for the people in the polling station to have voters stop by.  Otherwise we're just some people sat in a village hall or portacabin waiting for 10pm.

I hope that this shines a little light on the other side of the polling station table, and if you are eligible to vote on Thursday I hope that you'll be saying hi to the staff at your station!