Working Election Night: Josh McKeown, Year 3 History student, reflects

For nearly all of the thirty-two million people that voted in the General Election at the start of June, 10pm signalled the close of the polls, and many tuned in on television to watch the results be declared. However, for thousands of others around the country, 10pm is when the work starts to count and verify the results of the nation’s polling. In Cathedral House in Huddersfield, the results of four local constituencies, Batley & Spen, Colne Valley, Dewsbury, and Huddersfield, are declared, and I was part of the team that made the count possible. Most people that Kirklees Council employ on election night are counters, but there is also a small team of other assistants that complete non-counting tasks, of which I was one.

The duties of a General Assistant on election night are very varied. At 9.30pm, before the polls have closed, the counting hall and other rooms need preparing, and then from roughly 10.07pm, ballot boxes start arriving at the venue. Whilst the ballot box goes one way into the hall so that the votes can be counted, a bunch of other paperwork arrives with the ballot box from the polling station that needs organising into the correct place. This includes nearly 200 polling stations’ unused ballot papers, polling station information, and even stationary such as pencils, tape, and name badges. Once this paperwork has been organised and is ready to be shipped out of the venue, counting will be two to three hours in, meaning many ballot boxes will be finished with.

The next job of the general assistant is to remove these ballot boxes from the busy counting hall to enable each box to be stripped of paper on its outside, and checked to make sure it does not have any unique indicators on it, and then stacked in multiples of ten so that they can be stored overnight with minimal fuss before they are collected to be placed in more permanent storage ready for the next election.

To the historian, these jobs may not appear to have much application to the discipline, and the skills generated from studying history may not appear, on the surface, to be helpful to this sort of job. However, many transferrable skills that I learnt from studying history at Huddersfield over the past three years were applied to the tasks that I completed on election night. Debating with others in seminars developed my improvisational skills which were used when people delivering their ballot box failed to bring all their paperwork with them. A large portion of the night was spent checking through paperwork, and this required good attention to detail; this is a skill that has been developed from proof reading my undergraduate work.

As a historian, problem-solving is a skill that is constantly developed whilst researching because you will quite often run into problems with evidence, like it being incomplete, hard to read, or in another language, and your problem-solving skills are put to the test there to ensure you can utilise your evidence. These quite often require innovative solutions and unique ideas. One such idea I came up with during election night was to use a trolley designed to move stacks of chairs to alternatively move the stacks of ballot boxes. This idea enabled the team to speed up the process of moving the boxes and reduce the workload of heavy lifting. History may not have played a role in how I worked during this election night, but it did give me some transferable skills that I was able to apply to my work at Kirklees Council.

Working on election night was very interesting to a historian because this was one of those rare opportunities where I was able to see history in the making. This was one of the few snap elections that have been called in our recent history, and with a commanding lead in the opinion polls (as high as twenty-five points) at the start of the campaign, it should have been an easy victory for the Conservative Party. The Labour Party in the constituency of Dewsbury went into the campaign with a majority of 1,451 votes over the Conservative Party from the 2015 election. In that election, the UK Independence Party (UKIP) picked up 6,649 votes, but did not field a candidate in the 2017 election. The poll lead for the Conservatives added to the expectation that they would pick up a lot of these UKIP votes should have made Dewsbury an easy gain for the Conservatives. The result, one counted in the room in which I was working, saw the Labour Party increase their majority to 3,321 votes over the Conservative Party. This, as I have already mentioned, was a rare opportunity to see history in the making, and that is why working on election night was interesting from an historian’s point of view.

Witnessing the process of an election count has given me so much insight into the way democracy in our country works. Every single person in Cathedral House on the night of 8th June 2017 protects the sanctity of democracy in the United Kingdom, because without those people, our country would not be able to hold a secret ballot to elect the leaders of our nation. Being part of that team is an experience that enhances employability because it shows a willingness to get involved with the local community and adds more varied work experience to a graduate CV, work experience that nobody can ever have too much of in today’s job market.