Parliament changed a long-standing rule this week and will now leave the counting of votes to the experts. It turns out MPs just aren't that good at counting.
Under MMP most votes arrive in Parliament tidy and pre-counted. The parties each vote as a bloc and when a vote is called they announce that total to the clerks who are Parliament's secretariat.
All the clerks need to do is add up the totals, easy-peasy. Possibly not for me, but for most people.
But occasionally it is all done very differently. MPs get to cast a Personal Vote on conscience issues (sex and alcohol-adjacent topics mostly). When that happens MPs abandon the blocs (mostly) and vote the old-fashioned way. They are called into the debating chamber and then file out again through one of two doors helpfully named the Ayes and Noes doors. They literally vote with their feet.
At that point though it can all go horribly wrong.
Listen to The House from Sunday, which includes this story.
The lintel of the Ayes Door in Parliament's Debating Chamber. During a Personal Vote, if you want to vote FOR the proposal this is how you leave the room. To vote against it you cross the floor and exit via the opposite door.
Traditionally (during one of these Personal Votes), the total votes for each side of a question are counted by an MP. Someone who is heading out a door anyway is nominated as a 'Teller' for all the MPs voting the same way. But it turns out that MPs are not very good at counting. (Hopefully that doesn't apply to the Minister of Finance).
The whole thing is muddled and slow and there are frequent errors - sometimes huge ones (more on that later). Admittedly, the process is complicated by MPs who do not turn up to vote in person, but give someone else their vote to cast 'by proxy'. In that case the Teller must count both the actual bodies and also the ghosts (the proxy votes).
These ghostly proxy votes might sound like the kind of votes Donald Trump was hoping the Secretary of State would "find" for him in Georgia, but these ones are legitimate. Legitimate but confusing.
The Tellers mark all this down by crossing out present MPs' names on specially printed tally sheets (see below for an example), and then the Clerk's team count them up and cross-check them, comparing the Ayes and Noes sheets against each other to check MPs don't magically vote both ways. Yes, it does happen - you can see examples on the voting sheets below.
A mistake might occur if, say, an MP gives a colleague their proxy but then turns up to vote anyway, but forget to tell their colleague. Then they each go through a different door. I don't know how, but it happens…