Loath as we all are to disagree with Guido, on the issue of how fast votes are counted after elections he is Wrong and Iain Dale is Right.

In the FCO I have followed politics in communist Yugoslavia (no voting), apartheid South Africa (no voting for most people), Yeltsin’s Russia (early democracy, pretty good voting), post-war Bosnia (internationally organised and incomprehensible voting), post-Milosevic Serbia (more or less normal voting) and finally Poland (normal voting).

My conclusion?

That the UK system – vote on Thursday, know the results by Friday morning, removal van comes to No 10 (or not ) on Friday afternoon, new government formed over weekend, PM visits HM The Queen to launch the new government early following week – is one of the great wonders of Civilisation.

It builds on the enthusiasm and energy of the election process to get counting done quickly and honestly, leading to an astonishing, fast handover of power – and responsibility.

National business is done expeditiously and accurately. The contrast with what happens almost everywhere else is remarkable.

Once delays in counting appear, things can go awry. Apart from blatant new opportunities for cheating (votes mysteriously get ‘lost’ overnight) the public are left wondering what happened to their votes.

Popular momentum for Change gets diluted. The strong sense that one party has Lost and another has Won is eroded. This sends all the wrong psychological signals in a functioning democracy.

Look at what happened in Bosnia in the 1996 elections, the first after Dayton. There were non-trivial concerns that the counting was manipulated over the best part of two weeks to ensure that Izetbegovic (Bosniac) was proclaimed to have won the most votes – a victory for Krajisnik (Serb) would have been a massive humiliation for the Clinton administration. This sort of thing is utterly demoralising for the population as a whole.

Another classic example of attempted post-election manipulation was Serbia in 2000 (emphasis added):

In mid-2000 Milosevic had called elections in Serbia. We knew what he planned: win or lose, he would proclaim victory and carry on regardless. Working with the Otpor student group we and the Americans helped ensure that networks of computers were set up to get the real results out as fast as possible.

It worked. I sat at my FCO computer late on the evening of 24 September 2000 as the first result came in, from a tiny village in the mountains – a strong vote for Vojislav Kostunica and against Milosevic. Milosevic was heading for a crushing defeat.
The news spread like e-wildfire round Serbia. He’d lost! After some days of turmoil he was indeed toppled. The world’s first Internet example of people power, which my FCO team had helped support.
OK OK, you say. But we’re not (yet) the Balkans. We are  talking only about delaying the count for a few hours and doing it at a civilised time.
To which I say:
If it’s not broken, don’t fix it.
The media excitement and collected national democratic energy on UK election night count for something real and important in themselves. It would be a  damaging own-goal to abandon that for no good reason. A step in precisely the wrong direction.
Well done all those who have fought hard to keep things on track.