How are votes actually counted?

Brussels Sprout

What I mean is how are the counting staff organised so as to most efficiently count the votes?

Some of these constituencies have over 20 candidates so it must be tricky to do this.

I was thinking that they pass all the ballot papers (in bunches of say 100) down a line of people and each person in the line is responsible for removing the votes of one candidate. So for example in Cork South Central on the first count the first person might remove all of the Micheal Martin number 1's and pass on all of the others to the second person who takes out all of the Simon Coveney's etc etc

Is this actually how it's done or does each person just sort the ballots into a number of different piles?

Raging_Ninja

Brussels Sprout wrote: »

What I mean is how are the counting staff organised so as to most efficiently count the votes?

Some of these constituencies have over 20 candidates so it must be tricky to do this.

I was thinking that they pass all the ballot papers (in bunches of say 100) down a line of people and each person in the line is responsible for removing the votes of one candidate. So for example in Cork South Central on the first count the first person might remove all of the Micheal Martin number 1's and pass on all of the others to the second person who takes out all of the Simon Coveney's etc etc

Is this actually how it's done or does each person just sort the ballots into a number of different piles?

Each box is opened separately.

Brussels Sprout

Raging_Ninja wrote: »

Each box is opened separately.

That's not really what I was asking but alright when they open that box do they form clumps of ballot papers that they pass down a line of people or are there people taking papers and filing them into separate piles for each candidate?