Crewe Count

The recent post about the Crewe blog has reminded me that I didn't finish my story about why the Euro count was delayed in Cheshire East.

(Although I'm guessing that not many people care...I'm going to plod on regardless)

Basically, we finished Counting in Macclesfield not long after 8.30ish. We can't declare until after 9pm (when polls close in other countries) and we have to declare as a single area. This means Macc, Cong and Crewe must all be happy with their totals.

Macc and Cong were, but there were concerns in Crewe. In the end it took another couple of hours to get it straightened out.

It turned out that when the total number of votes were calculated on the Friday, someone had inadvertently put the ballot box seal number in the number of votes column. This was then totaled to give the complete number of votes - which was obviously wrong.

On Sunday, the total number of votes needs to match this figure. Obviously in Crewe this was never going to happen, and the mistake was spotted quite quickly. However, it took a while to get approval from Manchester to declare on the new totals.

So now you know.