TV coverage of elections

[john07]

Oct 10, 2015 16:54:52 GMT Davıd Boothroyd said:

Remember that ITN calls seats before they are officially announced, so not all of those 62 were actual results.

Is it not that ITV don't wait until pompous returning officers have pronounced?

[Davıd Boothroyd]

Update: All of the ITV coverage of the 2005 general election is now online. Although the close of the morning coverage looks abrupt, only a few seconds was missed.

www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLv8P1euPvQ_bEiOzFXgMIsNM6uBbD_hzL

(I'm hoping the last section of the overnight coverage stays even though it includes copyright music over the closing titles)

[johnloony]

Oct 13, 2015 8:30:44 GMT Davıd Boothroyd said:

Update: All of the ITV coverage of the 2005 general election is now online. Although the close of the morning coverage looks abrupt, only a few seconds was missed.

www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLv8P1euPvQ_bEiOzFXgMIsNM6uBbD_hzL

(I'm hoping the last section of the overnight coverage stays even though it includes copyright music over the closing titles)

Oh dear! There is a gap between 6am and 9:25am. My result was declared at 7:05am.

[Davıd Boothroyd]

Here's 'London Decides', made by London News Network and shown on Carlton at 11.20pm on Thursday 4 May 2000. Intended to report on the London Mayoral election, unfortunately there weren't any real election results declared during the programme (although there are some mentions of Assembly constituencies). Comparing the opinion poll with the actual election outcome is left as an exercise for the viewer.

[justin124]

I thought it was unlawful for election results to be divulged prior to the official declaration. I certainly recall back in the 1970s completing Declaration of Secrecy forms which included that stipulation. It was also the case that once having been admitted to the count , a person was not permitted to leave until the Declaration had been made.

[johnloony]

Nov 1, 2015 0:57:59 GMT justin124 said:

I thought it was unlawful for election results to be divulged prior to the official declaration. I certainly recall back in the 1970s completing Declaration of Secrecy forms which included that stipulation. It was also the case that once having been admitted to the count , a person was not permitted to leave until the Declaration had been made.

Your memory is not quite correct. It is an offence to disclose, before the voting has finished, information about how people have voted in postal votes (if you happen to have accidentally noticed); it is against the rules to disclose how an individual voter has voted (if you happen to notice or recognise the serial number on the ballot paper). It is not an offence to leak the result before it is officially declared, although it would be bad form to do so. It is certainly not against any rules to leave a count before the declaration (there would have been problems in Tower Hamlets in 2014 if it were) and I doubt if it ever has been.

There may be some places where the returning officer would be reluctant to let people leave and re-enter willy-nilly (especially if there are security concerns) but it wouldn't be lawful to prevent them leaving. For example, when one of my OMRLP colleagues stood against Tony Blair, everybody had to be searched thoroughly upon entering (including every badge being checked) and would have to re-searched if they left and came in again. There was a long queue of people and it took ages to process them all on the way in.

[justin124]

I am not in a position to really dispute what you have said, but would point out that the BBC election results programmes of the 1960s,70s and 80s did not contain advance information or rumours of the outcome in particular constituencies prior to the official declarations.Perhaps the absence of mobile phones was a factor then - I really don't know.
Another point that struck me from footage of the Billericay count in 1964 was that after votes had been bundled by the counting staff they were handed to party scrutineers for checking. This can be clearly seen as people wearing rosettes check the bundles handed over to them.This certainly has not been the practice since I first attended a local election count in 1973. Scutineers are, of course, now strictly forbidden to touch a ballot paper. I wonder when the rules changed.

[Andrew_S]

Nov 2, 2015 12:51:59 GMT justin124 said:

I am not in a position to really dispute what you have said, but would point out that the BBC election results programmes of the 1960s,70s and 80s did not contain advance information or rumours of the outcome in particular constituencies prior to the official declarations.Perhaps the absence of mobile phones was a factor then - I really don't know.
Another point that struck me from footage of the Billericay count in 1964 was that after votes had been bundled by the counting staff they were handed to party scrutineers for checking. This can be clearly seen as people wearing rosettes check the bundles handed over to them.This certainly has not been the practice since I first attended a local election count in 1973. Scutineers are, of course, now strictly forbidden to touch a ballot paper. I wonder when the rules changed.

It's a bit of a myth that things, in general, have got more informal over the last few decades IMO. Actually it's the other way round. So scrutineers touching ballot papers in the 1950s and 1960s was probably accepted even if it violated the rules. Lots of things were more informal in previous decades, it seems to me.

[johnloony]

The thing about not touching ballot papers is more of a rule or convention rather than a law. I have occasionally picked up a ballot paper if it has accidentally fallen onto the floor on the candidates' side of the table rather than the staff side - but only when there were lots of other candidates and agents to witness that there were no untoward contrafibularities.

When the result in my ward was fairly close in 2002 (the margin was 209 votes between the lowest winner and the highest loser), the R.O. allowed the losing agent to skim through the bundles quickly just to double-check that there were no bundles obviously in the wrong pile. In other words it was close, but not close enough for a proper recount.

[john07]

I recall from elections in 1979, that the candidates and agents were allowed to examine closely all disputed ballot papers and were handed them if this was requested.

[Davıd Boothroyd]

Is there any especial interest in the 4h05m of BBC coverage of the 2002 local elections?

Not a particularly vintage night. I think I recorded all of it but the time doesn't quite match with what was in the Radio Times (http://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/574ebfc642ff41eebf9d15e0a5e0dbd7)

[Andrew_S]

I used to have the 1994 Euro election BBC election night on video but unfortunately it got taped over and it doesn't seem to be on YouTube. I'd be interested if anyone has a copy of it. I remember there was a big improvement in Peter Snow's graphics that year with the target lists doing all sorts of fancy things like zooming in and out of the screen while things went on in the background at the same time.

[Davıd Boothroyd]

Here's possibly the oldest election night TV you're ever likely to see - some of NBC's coverage of the Presidential election of 1948. It picks up just at the point when Truman has won an unexpected re-election.

[Davıd Boothroyd]

At Missing Believed Wiped this year, there was a lovely promo for ITV's coverage of the February 1974 election which Kaleidoscope had turned up.

[greenhert]

Nov 2, 2015 21:58:57 GMT john07 said:

I recall from elections in 1979, that the candidates and agents were allowed to examine closely all disputed ballot papers and were handed them if this was requested.

I do not believe this is the case today, though. I was at a count in Hemel Hempstead (my own, since I was the Green Party parliamentary candidate for that constituency that year) in May 2015, and was clearly told by counting staff not to touch the ballot papers (I did not intend to do so). Hemel Hempstead did not have any recounts even over questions about saved or lost electoral deposits, but I am pretty sure that close examination of all dispute ballot papers probably would not have been allowed except when clearly necessary.

[greenhert]

Jun 23, 2015 23:16:07 GMT Davıd Boothroyd said:

Order and time of declaration in 2015, compiled from BBC

I see notably that Hemel Hempstead was as low as 596 on that list, and that it was as late until declaration no. 646 out of 650 (Berwick-upon-Tweed, Conservative gain from Liberal Democrat) that the Conservatives had officially reached an overall majority. At least that gave me time (alongside the other candidates) to see lots of key declarations and results....

[Davıd Boothroyd]

Just uploaded on Youtube, it's the CBS coverage of the 1952 Presidential election. Will US voters like Ike? I think that nice Adlai Stevenson must stand a chance.

PS doesn't Walter Cronkite look young?

[Davıd Boothroyd]

Here's a bumper playlist of nearly three hours of material from the Christchurch byelection of July 1993.

www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLv8P1euPvQ_batPck-9azesZAcaQ67gUs

[Davıd Boothroyd]

The Liverpool Walton byelection special from 4-5 July 1991.

[Harry Hayfield]

14,000 Liberal Democrat votes in a Liverpool constituency. Won't see that anytime soon, I will be uploading some more from 1966 over the Christmas holiday and then will be adding some more by-elections (post millennium) including Ceredigion, Ipswich (with the most bizarre post declaration event ever seen in the UK) and some of the other ones as well. I will also be putting the BBC Scotland referendum coverage, BBC Northern Ireland and BBC Wales general election coverage onto a disc and posting them to Andy for his collection as well.