KATY GORDON: What are the politically obsessed supposed to do on election night now? |
I’ll be honest, I couldn’t face writing this week’s column on what is probably the biggest news of the week: the council tax rises.
What is there to say that hasn’t already been said?
It seems like our contributions go up every year and services are either barely maintained at their same levels or cut back anyway. Equally it is getting harder to see where money can be saved without losing a service or facility vital to parts of our community.
It’s become tougher to understand or justify and at a certain point it just seems like Joe Public is giving more and more and getting less and less back.
So instead I’m going to write about the loss of one of my favourite parts of working in the media: Election night.
No overnight Scottish Parliament election counts this year
This year, the Scottish Parliament elections will not be decided in the wee hours of a Friday morning. Instead the vote count will begin at 9am on the day after voters head to the polls.
The Electoral Management Board for Scotland, which is in charge of holding elections in Scotland, has said that this change is designed to increase public engagement and reduce costs.
(In 2021, Scotland also held a daytime count but that was due to Covid restrictions in place at the time.)
But isn’t part of the fun of voting sitting up late and watching the results come in, our eyelids getting heavier as we wait for our constituency to be declared? Watching the little map of Scotland – or the UK – change colour with each declaration? Pouring more coffee, or something a little stiffer, to see you through?
Daytime count may not get engagement from voters
I’m not sure I think the board’s intentions will be reached. By moving the count to during the day on Friday, I’m not sure how much engagement will increase, as many people will be at work or school.
Not everyone is in a position to have the telly on or be glued to their phones as they work or learn. The only difference is that they’ll receive the news in the evening as opposed to waking up to it.
I also wonder who the counters will be. A lot of local authorities would ask for staff to volunteer, or sometimes recruit local bank employees to help with the counting, but if the count is during the day many of them will be at their normal jobs and unavailable to volunteer.
And do the count attendees and staff drink so much coffee that moving it to during the day will save that much money?
Long election night shifts might have me looking like a zombie, but I love them
Maybe it’s just me, and my love of election night is an occupational hazard.
I’ve covered local and national elections for more than 20 years now, sometimes from within counting centres – I was at the ill-fated Bell’s Sports Centre count in 2007 when the machines doing the counting failed and the count was stopped somewhere around 5am and restarted a few hours later – and other times from the office, getting updates from reporters on the ground.
I had my favourite count venue (Alloa Town Hall, in case you were wondering, with Bell’s a close second) and I enjoyed spending the hours waiting for news chatting to hopeful politicians and their election agents.
In fact, I often got a lot of news stories through those conversations, along with first interviews with MPs, MSPs and councillors post-election.
It is absolutely exhausting but also exhilarating.
Election nights create a real camaraderie within the newsroom as reporters, editors, sub-editors and designers pull some of the longest shifts of their careers to get the results out to readers as quickly as possible and get papers onto the presses for early morning special editions.
I’ve personally worked a full day shift on election day, go home for a few hours then head back out at around 11pm for the results and then get to bed at noon the next day.
Members of the team who weren’t on election duties overnight would come in fresh-faced in the morning and were faced with the rest of us looking very much like extras from 28 Years Later and in need of our beds.
The buzz of seeing the returns is unbeatable
Even in the few years I was away from the newsroom I still sat up, refreshing The Courier’s live blogs online as BBC News played on the TV and posting my thoughts on social media.
I was joined online by others who were equally as interested and fixated on how our country would look politically for the next few years.
But now what are the journalists and political junkies meant to do this time?
Go to bed nice and early and get up the next morning bright-eyed and bushy tailed?
It doesn’t seem right.