After the clamour of election day, with politicians emerging smiling from their constituency polling stations, comes the hard graft: the high pressure counts in local authorities around the country. For the past five elections, Sunderland have declared the first results, with three constituencies in the borough declaring before midnight – no mean feat when polls close at 10pm. What makes Sunderland so effective at returning results so quickly?

“I think attention to detail. We’re always driven by trying to improve the accuracy and efficiency of how we do the election,” Dave Smith, the council’s chief executive explains. “People have turned out to vote, politicians have put themselves forward and gone through the process, so I feel that we owe them, and have a responsibility to return the results as soon as possible.”

He says his employees and volunteers are all proud of the efficiency of the counting process. “I think it’s engendered in the professionalism of everyone from the individual counters on the desk to those that are supervising the process. People feel part of it, and feel they want to contribute. And that obviously includes using sixth formers from local schools, who run the boxes in for us – it’s all part of the community feeling part of the process.”

How regimented is it? Is everything planned down to the minute? “Yes, absolutely. Everything. We seek to improve times by looking at the logistics of the room, how we set the tables out, how quickly we can move the boxes from the point of entry, to being emptied out, verified and counted,” says Smith. In 2005, before he took office in 2008, Sunderland reportedly manipulated traffic lights so vans carrying ballot boxes had an unhindered journey to the count.

“Obviously like everywhere else, we’re controlled by the regulation of how a count must be conducted, so we work within those parameters. But we look for the best possible processes to do it,” Smith says. “We have a huge mix of people – obviously there’s council staff, but equally we have lots of bank tellers who’ve got experience, and we learn from them too.”

The attention to detail in returning a hyper-efficient result means every single aspect of the process is scrutinised over and over again to achieve a seamless result, even down to the paper used for voting slips. “One of things that’s changed is we use a different weight of paper now, because it’s quicker to count,” he says. “The tellers tell you that.”

Does Smith think Sunderland will beat the record on May 7? He laughs nervously and umms and ahhs for a few seconds before answering. “I don’t know. We’ve certainly looking to try and improve, and we’ve been planning this for a number of months now. All the training is continuing even now. We’ll do our level best on the night. But most of all I want to do it properly, so we won’t cut corners.”

Smith is staunch in his defence of Sunderland’s reputation, and rebuffs all attempts to discredit the historic achievement. “People have said in the past ‘Oh, you cut corners’. Well actually, we don’t,” he says. “We don’t cut any corners. But what we do do, is just by very technical details, probably boring things to the public, is constantly improve. We look at the detail.”

What’s new this year? “We’ve changed the layout of the room, modified slightly from last time. So we’ve positioned the counters to give them a bit more room to count. We’ve introduced some more technology to help verify the numbers and collate the information quicker, rather than manual paper system,” he explains. “They all shave little bits of time off the process.”

To avert disappointment, there are even spare tellers waiting in the wings, and a backup generator on standby in case of power cuts. Every second counts in Sunderland, and all eyes will be looking north to see if they can beat their record.

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