The UK has the system of declaring the results of individual seats, which will leave it even murkier what happened and why.
With optional second preference, its possible to arrange for people to see it directly on the night. The formal reading of the result would be the first preference vote and then the result after all preferences have been distributed, but the full preference array can be readily released and displayed. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
I would prefer it if we counted by polling district. However British tradition is to combine the ballot papers over the whole constituency, before counting commences. It is possible to get an estimate of the vote distribution in a polling district, during the verification when the number of ballot papers in the box is compared to the number which the officials had issued.
It will be more obscure. A diligent and committed voter will be able to work out what happened if they wish, or if someone in their constituency makes the inquiry and makes their findings public ... but certainly is not a clear as a layout by first preference votes and the distribution of their second preferences, which is information that can be used by television news reporting to provide automatic animations of accumulation of two-party-preferred vote shares. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
I would prefer it if we counted by polling district.
That is the way it is done in Sweden, and presented on the excellent site of Valmyndigheten. Here is for example the 96 polling places in Linköping in the 2009 EP-election:
Linköping - Röster - Val 2009
Val till Europaparlamentet - Röster Linköping Samtliga 96 valdistrikt räknade
Samtliga 96 valdistrikt räknade
Scroll down and see them in percent. Klick "Visa antal" to see the number. A vote for PES is a vote for EPP! A vote for EPP is a vote for PES! Support the coalition, vote EPP-PES in 2009!
The Australian counting process takes more than a week longer than I suspect an AV count would in the UK. That is down to various differences in the detailed voting arrangements. For example postal votes have to be received by the returning officer by the close of polling on the election day, to be valid in the UK. The Australians seem to allow a much longer time for the postal votes to arrive, which delays the final result accordingly.
The Australians also work out the 2 party preferred result, which tries to identify the final two candidates and give figures for the support they are likely to have once all the preferences have been distributed. I presume this evolved as a method of giving a good indication of the result at an early stage. It is only when the election is very close that the eventual winner is likely to change, after the detailed count takes place.
The proposed UK system will include no comparable 2 party preferred stage. I suspect almost all UK counts would be finished on the Friday, after the election has taken place on a Thursday, just as they are under first past the post. However counts, which have gone to the distribution of preferences, will no doubt take longer than in the past.
The UK politicians did want to preserve the tradition of election counts being carried out in the early hours on Friday morning, mostly by election officials who had been manning polling stations for 12 hours or so on the previous day. After all things go so much more smoothly if everybody involved has not slept for 24 hours or so, by the end of the count. When it looked like most returning officers intended to start the count at about 9.00 am on Friday, just before the 2010 election, Parliament legislated to require the count to start as soon as possible after the close of poll. I am not sure if that requirement will still be imposed, under an AV system (but nothing was changed on that issue in the current bill).
