UK Elections

Yesterday, May 1, was an election day here in the UK. Some members of the parliament were up for re-election throughout the UK, and there was a contest for the mayor here in London.

All month long there have been news stories about the London mayoral race: Boris Johnson, a young, blonde, zany-looking guy was challenging the older, more liberal incumbent, Ken Livingstone.

During the day, there were signs for Polling Places all over town. (On Tuesday night, at the tube stop, there had been a young man standing just out of the rain handing out brochures urging people to vote for Liberal candidates.)

So, last night at 10pm, after all the polling places had closed, I tuned into the television news program to see what the results of the election were.

Well, there were no results. The announcers claimed that the polls had just closed, the voting was officially over, and now they were counting the votes. The results would come in sometime during the night or the next day. Then they moved on to report other news.

What!!?? No declared winners from the networks -- based on one half of one percent of the vote??? No predictions based on the exit polls??? No panel of commentators discussing all the possible outcomes based on the current available data?? No all-night broadcasts? What a strange and refreshing way to handle an election. First you count the votes. Then you announce who won.

Today, the next morning, we have learned that many Labour (not Labor) positions were lost to Conservatives throughout the UK (which apparently has strong negative implications for the Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown.) However, all the results are not in yet. We still don't know who will be the mayor of London, but it looks as if zany Boris is in the lead. We should know the final results sometime later today. "And now on to the other news..."