Good Morning and Happy Sunday to Londoners and the rest of the world!
First off, apologies for the photograph. I hope the coffee doesn’t stain.
A thread I put on X yesterday is being completely throttled as it is probably deemed controversial by AI. It is going on here so you can 1) actually see it, 2) share it widely and 3) so I don’t have to deal with robots.
Many of us found it odd that that this last London Mayoral Election vote count was on a Saturday. Starting 36 hours after the end of polling.
Shouts of conspiracy theorist and a stream of abuse from the left wings flooded in on my comment on Adam Brooke’s thread here. ‘It’s always on a Saturday you Loon, tin foil hatter, conspiracy etc’. Someone even had the gall to call me an old woman. Begone with you I say!
I hadn’t checked all the other Mayoral elections at that point, so reasoned with them on the basis that no other election is given its own special and very separate counting day.
This is how that attempt went:
One poster said it was because they didn’t want to clash with a General Election.
My response went something like: Often local and national elections are held at the same time and even police commissioner elections. So what exactly is the problem with adding one more piece of paper and counting them all at the same time?
I think everyone will agree that holding ballot boxes for 36 hours in a building somewhere, whether it has always been done this way in the Mayoral elections or not, is only going to increase questions as to legitimacy of the result.
Nobody has any idea who was guarding them, whether there was 24/7 monitoring, who transported them from the polling stations to the site etc.
Some of these questions should be asked for ALL elections.
But in my view the London Mayoral election isn’t some special case… they are not voting in a King of London… and should not be governed differently.
It seems that Greater Manchester and Birmingham also run their Mayoral Elections on the same timetable. Convenient.’
…. more streams of abuse.
So now for the hard work.
Here are the first four elections, with results, and rough announcement times.
‘The first election for London Mayor was held on
May 4th 2000.
The local elections were held on the SAME day.
The turnout for the Mayoral vote was 1,340,000 approximately.
Ken Livingstone was voted in to the position on Mayor of London on exactly the same day as the vote
4th MAY 2000.
Now to check the other five.
So to all those saying it has always been counted two days later, on that score you are all incorrect.
Next up 2004.
The London Mayoral election was held on 10 June 2004.
The Local elections were held on the same day.
Ken Livingstone ran again and won, this time with a turnout of 37% and 1,920,560 ballots cast.
The results were announced on Friday 11th of June at 19:45
The delay in declaration is noted on the video to have been caused by ‘power cuts and counting machines failing’.
The delay was NOT expected nor planned.
The third Mayoral election was held on Thursday 1st May 2008.
The local elections were held at the same time.
Boris won 53% and 1,168,738 votes against Ken Livingstone’s 47%
The results were announced in the evening of Friday 2nd May 2008 and reported earlier the next morning.
There is no official footage of the announcement, just a few clips from ATP.
So for a third election the count was not conducted on the Saturday as others claim they all have been.
The fourth London Mayoral Election was held on Thursday 3rd May, 2012, the same year GB hosted the Olympic Games.
The local elections were held on same day, 3rd May 2012.
Boris won the election for the second time with 44% of the vote against Ken Livingstone’s 40.3%. The turnout was 37.5% or 2,208,457 votes cast.
The vote result was expected on the evening of Friday 4th of May, as per the previous 2 elections, and was delivered just before midnight.
A fourth London Mayoral election count NOT delayed until the Saturday after voting.’
…. even more streams of abuse.
So far so good. Looks normal. There is a little shunting of the count to Friday but that seems to be adopted due to time constraints over night Thursday. Maybe due to the local elections.
The next post on X I have had a lot of trouble with. Perhaps because by piecing the timeline together, it reveals something quite disturbing, not only about the appearance of manipulation of the election process. It is disturbing because it seems to indicate that someone involved in the re-planning for these election ‘TWEAKS’, had some sort of psychic ability to foresee and attempt to sidestep Covid.
Anyway, tumbleweed and crickets…
Here is the thread. I have even tried sanitising it to remove all implications of accusation and get AI to let it through. Oh and I removed this report link, but I seem to have made things far worse.
‘Smoking gun peeps. The count has NEVER been done on a single site on the Saturday… ever. This London Mayoral Election Special historical breakdown deserves a post of its own.
The fifth London Mayoral Election was held on Thursday 5th May 2016.
The local elections were also held on the 5th May 2016.
Polls closed that night. Some Voters were turned away from polling in Barnet as 155 polling stations received incomplete voter lists.
Sadiq Khan won with 44.2% of the vote, beating Zac Goldsmith who received 35% of the vote.
Votes cast 2,596,961, a turnout of 46.1%, comparable to numbers from two years prior.
The results for the 2016 were announced on Saturday 7th May, well after midnight.
After the election, in November 2016 the London Assembly under Sadiq Khan issued a report.
In this report Election Review Panel Members Len Duvall (Chair) from Labour, Sian Berry from the Green Party and Peter Whittle from UKIP put forward the case for moving the Mayoral election to October or to the year after the next Local Elections.
This would have brought the next election in to 2021, giving Sadiq Khan a 5 YEAR TERM that would coincidentally LEAPFROG over the COVID lockdown of 2020.
They cited the oversight in Barnet and their failure to reach the expected count deadline as reasons for the proposal to shift the election.
They also suggested government consider that the London Mayoral and Assembly Elections fall in line with the five year terms adopted by the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish Assemblies.
They pressed government for an early decision to save time and money. This would have given the elected Mayor a five year term in perpetuity.
The next scheduled election date should have been May/June 2020 but Covid lockdown was in place.
The London Mayoral Election was therefore moved to 6th May 2021, the following year, as per one of the two original proposals made in the November 2016 report. Convenient!
Thankfully to date, government has not agreed to a five year term and the election cycle was restored to what would have been the scheduled year - 2024.
Somewhere between 2016 and 2021, an agreement was made to shift part of the count to the Saturday.
The 2021 London Mayoral Election was held on the 6th of May. Seven constituencies were counted on the Friday 7th May 2021 and the remaining seven on the Saturday 8th of May 2021.
These counts were done electronically in constituencies as the previous count had been. The results were returned at the City Hall on the evening of Saturday May 8th 2021.
Therefore the London Mayoral Election 2024 is the FIRST election to have the official count begin at a single counting site and the FIRST to start exclusively on the Saturday to be returned on the Saturday.
Checking was apparently done on the Friday though this has not been confirmed publicly through official channels. This is where ballot boxes are opened in front of Candidates and members of the campaign teams, mail ballots are added, and they are batched ready for counting. How they were left overnight, in boxes or in piles on tables is anyone’s guess, as is whoever was guarding the site, or even where the site was!
It also seems to be the first London Mayoral Election for some time, possibly ever, to be using Paper ballots exclusively.
Receipts below’
You can see all the receipts btw on the threads above and I include the two posts on Facebook incase you are on there instead here and here.
Needless to say things are not looking good for the honesty division in the Labour Party, or for their supporters (and copious bots) who keep insisting that the election has ALWAYS been counted on a Saturday …
The only conclusion I can make is that the toxic onslaught has compromised their memories.
I won’t go in to the switch from machine to paper ballot voting. That is another wormhole we will likely never climb out of.
I’ll leave this with you. Do share. It will be interesting to see what the responses are.
Oh and was curious to see that other Mayoral elections under Labour control were also given the honour of having a unique Saturday count.
Agree with you 100%!! Corruption!
Counting half the votes on Saturday gives them plenty of time to see the results for the other half on Friday and add votes accordingly. Doubt that it’s just a Labour thing though and when did Labour parties around the place suddenly become the media favourites. Not in my 40 previous years of noticing these things.