But Really, Who's Prime Minister?

I feel like I have to write a really really long entry about elections over here, because it was the most amazing and exhausting experience I've had here. And yet the UK still has no definitive leader.

The whole mess started on Thursday morning. My alarm went off at 6:30 and I laughed at it and fell asleep for another half hour. When I did get up, I managed to get myself together and get down to Southend around 9 AM. And as soon as I dropped my bag off at the office, I was out at a polling stations telling (recording polling numbers so that the party can see who actually went to vote, and who didn't). Froze my ass off with a few other sort of rude Conservatives down in Southend.

When Dennis made it to the station, I was off to "knock up" doors (which sounds pretty wrong, but it's basically just knocking on doors to make sure they voted) for the next however long. Kevin and Chris and David Norman were off in the Labourmobile (the picture right here) with a loudspeaker on top, yelling at people to go vote - and sometimes to use better language when insulting the Labour party. I went back to Coleman Street to do more telling, ended up talking to this little kid who asked what language I was speaking. Clearly, he understood every word I was saying, but I just sounded different. Thought it was pretty funny.

The exciting part of the night was the count. Over here, they still do the paper ballots rather than the electronic votes that we do (or the crazy ones they do in Florida, which is probably for the best, to be honest), so they had to hand count every single vote in the constituency - the area has over 70,000 people in it, and that's just Rochford and Southend East. So before the count could even begin, they had to verify that all the votes were real, and that everyone agreed on how many there were. So the prelims for the counting started at 10 PM. The actual results didn't happen until 5 AM the next morning.

The bar upstairs was where a lot of the action was, and where all the comfortable warm chairs (the sports center was FREEZING) and alcohol were. It was also where the televisions were with Sky News (they have better election coverage than BBC) and the BBC were showing. Got to watch the whole country vote, got to see Ian more excited than I've ever seen him and almost smack Tim when they called Birmingham Edgbaston for Labour. That's also where we went to drown sorrows when Angela Smith lost her seat to the Conservatives.

The other responsibility was to watch the votes and make sure that they were all going in the right piles. Rob was pretty good at this one, he was watching this one table from Victoria like a hawk. When they finally did turn in the verdict, it was around 4:45 AM. James Duddridge won, to no one's surprise, and gave a nice speech. Kevin got second and made a very nice speech. They called the Southend West right after, and Tom got third place. And then we all went to sleep for like 4 hours before the local count (which unfortunately didn't go as well as hoped).

Turns out that Kevin won a spot on the council in Lewisham, though, so there you go.