Don’t count on it: the case for bringing back election night

The polls closed at ten. The boxes were sealed. Scotland went to bed and left its ballots like dirty dishes in the sink. We’ll get to them in the morning. What began as a pandemic exception in 2021 has now been normalised.

This week Scotland went to the polls in a fit of apathy and the people in charge of the count appeared to share it. In the pre-pandemic era, election nights used to be characterised by the coarseness of crackling microphones in leisure centres, thumbs on chins as volunteer leafleters stare down counting staff. The triumph of a new MSP’s acceptance speech is heightened by its delivery at 3 in the morning and the bleakness of an old-guard defeat even more so. Most of the country slept through it but the point was that the country could have watched, while the ink was still wet on the ballots. During the daytime voters demonstrated that they were minded to care and in the evening government repaid the compliment. The verdict and the vote belonged to the same night not just because the theatrics of an election night were appreciated by the all too unhealthily interested like me but because to delay the results was to demean them.

The process got underway on Friday morning. By now, after the regional list has been chewed through by the d’Hondt machinery, we have the arithmetic of the next parliament. None of which is wrong, exactly. It is simply diminished. It is a criticism often made from many corners of our politics that the broadcasters overlook Scotland and although hardly a mention was made of it in the early hours of Friday morning (when the political and media class were curating the initial narrative) their decision was perfectly sound. It wasn’t the British media who said that our ballots weren’t a sufficiently pressing matter to attend to right away, we did. Newcastle-under-Lyme felt different and as such became the big story of the post-count morning when it was announced around 6:30am that they were Reform UK’s first council gain of this election. Scotland opted out of the narrative.

The decision to abolish the overnight count was taken on 28 October last year by the Electoral Management Board for Scotland, a body of which most voters have never heard. Its convener explained that counting in the day would let returning officers use “well-rested staff with quick access to more resources, people and support facilities,” and would “add resilience to a complex process.” The Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee raised no public objection. It was made to sound like a subtle and technical refinement that needs no further justification to the electorate, much less their consent. And so a habit that had defined all but one Holyrood election since devolution (the 2021 pandemic election in which the overnight count was suspended on public health grounds) was put to bed.

The Westminster parliament did rather better when this question came before it. In early 2010, several dozen returning officers in England announced their intention to count next-day for the same reasons being given here now. This animated certain quarters of the Houses. Then-Speaker John Bercow called publicly for counts to be held overnight. An Early Day Motion attracted 114 signatures, denouncing a Friday-afternoon count as regressive. Section 48 of the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010 placed a statutory duty on returning officers to begin counting within four hours of the close of poll, or to publish a written explanation if they did not. The principle was debated. It was voted on. It was written into law. In Scotland, the same principle has been written out of practice by an unelected board, in correspondence, and with almost no societal debate.

The official case rests on the voting system. Holyrood elections use the Additional Member System, with two ballot papers: constituency votes and regional votes, with regional seats allocated through modified d’Hondt. The Board says this is too complex to count overnight. The proposed impossibility of climbing this hill would be more persuasive if the same broad electoral system had played out plenty of times before, and been counted overnight. The 2021 daytime count was a pandemic measure, not an invitation to tinker with our election mechanics. Past problems in Scottish election administration do not prove that overnight counting itself is the problem. And it is the formula-based regional seat allocations, the part the Board cites as most demanding, that is arguably least dependent on tired people in the wee hours.

Participation in our democracy remains fragile. Holyrood turnout reached 63.5 per cent in 2021, but that was a pandemic-era high, while the 2022 council elections managed only 44.8 per cent. Voters are unenthused, and this decision, the stripping away of immediacy from the process, feels like a response in kind. This year, in 2026, we look to have enticed around 53% of our fellow Scots to the polls.

Whatever one thinks of independence, the case for it has always rested in part on a claim about Scottish civic capacity. We are a nation, the argument goes, with the institutions, the talent and the seriousness to govern ourselves. To run a national parliamentary count overnight is not the most demanding test of statehood, but to decline even that test on grounds of capacity affirms something very alarming about our local government machinery that should not sit outside the frame of our political discussion nor of political accountability. Norway can count overnight. Iceland counts overnight. Denmark counts overnight. These are small nations like us and they manage it. It is an odd species of national confidence that can set its face to nation-statehood but its back to a long Thursday night in Inverness Leisure Centre. And particularly to justify that choice on the basis of means and capability.

This needn’t be permanent. The next Parliament can revisit the decision, and it should. A Holyrood version of the Westminster four-hour rule would put the principle beyond the reach of managerial convenience. The overnight count was one of the few moments at which Scottish democracy made itself visible to itself, in real time, in the same hours in which it had been performed. 

It is an argument that rates messaging over pragmatism, I accept that, but during an era where many in our country feel that their voice doesn’t matter, our system should be careful not to affirm that. Efficiency was never the point of the overnight count. Being seen to do it, and overcome the burdens of it, was where its value lay. The count should return to the night, if only to signal that it is too important to wait until the morning.