The votes have been cast, the polling stations are closed, and now comes the part nobody warned you about: the waiting.
Millions of people across England, Scotland and Wales turned out to have their say, whether in the parliamentary contests north and south of Hadrian’s Wall or in the local council battles playing out across English towns and cities. Now the count is under way, and the results will trickle in at very different speeds depending on where you’re looking.
In Scotland, the Scottish Parliament election uses the Additional Member System, which is famously more complicated to count than a straightforward first-past-the-post ballot. Most constituency results are expected overnight, but the regional list seats, the ones that top up the proportional representation element, tend to follow in the early hours of Friday morning. Expect the full picture to emerge somewhere between 4am and 7am.
The Senedd elections in Wales follow a similar pattern. Wales switched to a new proportional voting system this time around, expanding the number of seats from 60 to 96. That’s a significantly bigger count, and officials have warned it could take longer than voters are used to. A full result may not be confirmed until Friday afternoon.
Then there’s England, where local elections are their own peculiar beast. Counts are spread across dozens of separate councils, each running at its own pace. Some results come in before midnight; others drag into Friday evening. There’s no single moment of revelation, just a slow accumulation of gains and losses that the broadcasters stitch together into a national narrative.
The BBC and ITV will both be running live results programmes through the night, with the BBC’s coverage anchored by Mishal Husain. Sky News is also in for the long haul.
“These counts are genuinely complex logistical operations,” one returning officer noted ahead of polling day. “People expect speed, but accuracy has to come first.”
By Friday lunchtime, we should have enough data to know which way the political wind is blowing. Whether the results confirm the polls or throw up a genuine surprise, well, that’s rather the point of counting in the first place.
