The commissions counted the votes almost until 9:00 a.m. What is causing these delays in their work? As the commission members themselves say, firstly, there were many lists, and secondly, many candidates. Everything had to be counted by hand. (Surprisingly, however, there were not that many invalid votes.)
“We are still waiting for the results; the commissions are working and counting the votes,” says Jerzy Zieliński, secretary of Miasto Bolesławiec. “Please remember that there were four elections held on one day, making this the most complicated election. Simply transferring the ballot papers takes two to three hours.”
He adds: “It is a terrible experiment on people. The mere fact that the commission responsible for conducting the elections had to formally hand everything over to the commission responsible for determining the election results took those commissions 2.5–3 hours.”
The result was that the commissions began counting the votes around midnight. There were other problems as well. At polling stations where, for example, there were two precinct commissions, some voters became impatient. Seeing that the queue at another ballot box was shorter, they put their ballots there. The commissions then had several more ballot papers than indicated in the protocol. (And it was necessary to determine what had happened.)
We will return to the topic.