Jeremy Thomas
Oxford City Council’s returning officer

Oxford Mail:

We’ve got four main objectives. We make sure people can register to vote if they are entitled to do so, we make sure those people who want to stand as candidates can do so.

We make sure people can vote on the day and we count the votes to make sure they reflect the will of the population.

We have a team of four to organise the whole thing and we have to employ literally hundreds of people for a single day in 70 polling stations across the city to make sure people can vote.

We start appointing people as early as January. We have a database of people who we call back at each election and we try to draw on people who work in local government because we know they have already been cleared to work.

In the three weeks running up to the election we do lots of training and briefing for our staff to make sure they know what processes to go though on the day.

In the week before, the big job is to make sure the ballot boxes get packed and are all collected by presiding officials on the day before the election.

There are some polling stations in pretty strange places. We have all sorts of public buildings in use for the day.

There is one in the Magdalen College auditorium, one in a centre for the deaf and even one in Barton which is in a laundrette.

At Five Mile Drive we couldn’t find a suitable building so we had to set up a temporary building.

There will be hundreds of folding booths which will be set up in the polling stations. We will send out literally hundreds of ballot boxes, hundreds of sets of stationery and pencils. These things don’t just appear in the polling stations.

On the day itself we will be in the office on call at 6am and we will have inspectors going out checking the polling stations have opened at 7am.

Inevitably there will be some sickness on the day so we have to find replacement staff where they are needed. Once people have voted and the polling stations close at 10pm, our officers will check how many votes there are in each ballot box against the lists of registered voters who arrived at the polling stations.

Then we start counting the number of votes for each candidate and the numbers of votes that have been spoiled.

After that we add up the totals again to make sure they match the verified numbers of votes. Then we can see who has won and we declare the results.

We will be on duty until we declare the result somewhere between 2am and 6am, so it could be literally be a 24-hour day.”