1) Why is the vote count so slow for local elections relative to Westminster elections? It has been more than 24 hours and it still seems to be going on with only 150 out of 161 councils done. Is it because some councils have rules saying that counts cannot be done until the Sunday when the Euro elections results are counted? If not why is this so slow. Only place I know of that is slower than this is my home county of Westchester of NY state. But vote counting in Westchester has to be the most incompetent in the whole world.
The London councils (which seem to be the most delayed) generally have multi-member wards where each voter has as many votes as there are seats. The procedure, as I understand it, is first to extract straight-ticket votes (where a voter chose all the candidates from a particular party) from split-ticket votes, where the range of possible combinations take much longer to tabulate.
Most of the earlier councils to declare have only single-seat contests which are simpler to tabulate.
It's meant to be the latter. London and Scotland, both of which have their reasons for not liking UKIP very much, didn't vote last year and the PVI adjustment last year might have been more generous to UKIP. The other areas that didn't vote last year were the old metropolitan counties whereas almost all of rural and small-town England voted last year but not this year.
