Nearly 43,000 EP election votes remain uncollected

Nearly 43,000 votes for Saturday’s European Parliament elections remain uncollected, the Electoral Commission said on Wednesday. The number of uncollected votes for the local council elections stood at 96,670 on Tuesday.

Voters can collect their voting documents from the Naxxar counting hall until Thursday at midnight.

The Commission said that ballot boxes will start arriving at the counting hall at 10pm on Saturday. They will be opened and placed in cardboard boxes in preparation for the next part of the process.

At 7am on Sunday votes will start to be checked manually to ensure that they do not contain any marks or other. Every single vote will be checked by party agents to before moving on to the next process.

The commission said this process could take a significant amount of time, however, between 8 and 9am the first projections are expected from the two main political parties.

The votes will then start being scanned and will each be given a unique number by the scanning machine.

Once the scanning is completed, the counting process will begin. The process, which in the past used to take some three days, will this time round be completed in a matter of minutes. The two parties will then have up to four hours to lodge any complaints about the result.

Votes for the local council elections will be counted in three batches between Wednesday and Friday.

There are approximately 360,000 people eligible to vote in the European Parliament elections and 423,000 in the local council elections.