What Time Will the Brexit Decision be Made?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I work for a finance company, so needless to say we are following Brexit pretty closely.

We are doing a “what happens now” webinar after the votes have been tabulated (at 2:30 AM when the London markets open), and we want to send an email telling our customers about it at around 5PM Eastern.

I’m tasked with writing the email, and we’re debating whether or not the votes will be tabulated by then.

Can any UK dopers shed any light as to how long the voting time is? I know in America we have to wait forever so the west-coast can weigh in, but the UK is all in one timezone, so does that make it quicker?

2

Voting finishes at 2200 BST, but it’ll depend on exactly how close it is - and every poll says it’ll be a close one - as well as the level of voter turnout as to when the result will be called. Radio 4’s results program finishes at 0600, so hopefully we’ll know by the morning. Beeb reports that by 0400 it’s a ‘safe bet’ that we’ll know one way or the other.

3

Everybody including the BBC website will have predictions all day tomorrow and certainly from about 10pm (GMT)
By early morning on Friday those predictions should be much more firm and by about 6am the result may be clear.

I would expect an official announcement about 10am to midday Friday.
All GMT.

4

The Scottish referendum would be a good comparison: when were the results available for that?

5

So suffice it to say, I’m better off writing a “The decision is coming and we’ll have it to you at 2 AM” versus writing a “they’re leaving!” or “they’re staying!” email?

6

You should not assume that, two hours and thirty minutes after the polls close, you will know the result. You may know it with a reasonable degree of confidence, but equally you may not. The closer the vote is, naturally, the longer it will be before you can be confident of the result.

7

Just to clarify, the counting of votes in the UK is the responsibility of the local government (the city or county, in US terms).

There’ll be no exit poll in this case, since exit polls work by comparing results with the results of the previous vote, and the last EU referendum in the UK was too long ago to be of any use for this purpose.

How long it takes to count the votes in each local government area depends on a number of factors. How many people have voted? (All other things being equal, a high turnout obviously makes for a longer count.) How many people has the local government provided to conduct the count? Is the area small and compact, or large and sparse? (Votes are brought to a central location for counting.)

The counts from each area are declared locally, and are aggregated to determine the final outcome.

Results from small local government areas with low populations tend to come in first, from about 2 hours after polls close - say, around midnight - but they tend to be too small and idiosyncratic to be much use for making projections.

Within the hour after that, you will start to get results from larger areas that, traditionally, make an effort to be among the first to declare - Sunderland, in the North East; Swindon, to the west of London; a couple of others. The actual outcome in these areas won’t determine the outcome nationally, of course, but any variance between actual outcome and what the opinion polls for these areas were saying before in recent days and weeks can be used to attempt a projection of the national outcome. Swindon, for example, is expected to vote heavily for “leave”; if it doesn’t, that might signal that the “leave” campaign is in for a torrid night, even if they actually win Swindon.

Another hour, and you’re getting results from smaller areas in Northern Ireland and Scotland. Again, these won’t be nationally representative in themselves (they are confidently expected to vote “Remain”) but they may help to clarify how accurate polling has been.

Another hour, and results from London districts are coming in. We’re up to 3:00 am now. At this stage we have a sufficient diversity of results from different parts of the country to get a very good handle on how well the polls are being borne out, and it becomes possible to make increasingly strong predictions about the areas yet to declare. But that prediction could well be “it’s going to be very tight”.

If it’s really tight, you may well have to wait until around 7:00 am on Friday for all the results to be declared from every area. Even then, there’s a possibility of recounts if there are challenges to the integrity of the counting process (but that would be for particular areas, not nationally). But, barring recounts, the result should be officially declared at breakfast time on Friday morning.

8

Slight nitpick: There’s also voting being held in Gibraltar which is one hour ahead. The polls there close at 10 PM local time, which is an hour before they close in the UK. So it won’t delay things, I just wanted to be nitpicky!

9

The general expectation is that we’ll have a final result around “breakfast time” in the UK - but whether that’s a 7am breakfast or a 10am breakfast isn’t yet known. They’ll be counting as fast as they can, and a general trend might be clear by 3 or 4 am, but nothing is really certain in a referendum that’s this close to the edge, according to all the pre-poll results.

10

Not much to add to what others have said, but you are aware the LSE is (as usual) scheduled to open at 8am BST? Apologies if you’re in a time zone which makes both statements true.

If the result is close, there is a possibility that the LSE will delay opening until things are clearer (this is pure speculation on my part, mind you). Personally, I think the result will be predictable with a fairly high degree of confidence before 8am and things will proceed as normal.

11

Nope, you’re right. I just mistyped.

I was getting too far ahead of myself and combined two separate thoughts.

12

One thing to keep in mind is that there was no previous referendum to compare it to. Remember when Karl Rove had a hissy fit because the Fox decision desk had conceded Ohio to Obama? The sort of thing the decision desk was doing was comparing the results, in precincts selected to sort of represent the state, of the 2008 and 2012 votes. If Obama was x% doing better in 2012 in those precincts than he had in 2008, then you assumed he would do x% better in 2012. So even though the current, very fragmentary count, still had Romney ahead, the pattern was such that it was a pretty safe conclusion that Obama had won the state.

In the case of the Brexit referendum, there are no such comparisons possible and hence they will have to wait till the results are fairly complete (at least 50%, I would guess) to make a call. The polls close at 5PM EDT, so I might know the probable result by 10. I did in the Scottish vote, but remember the no side get 57%. If it is more like 50.1% for one or the other, it could be a long night.

13

Slate just published an article with a detailed answer. UDS had an accurate summary above.

14

When I went to sleep at 11PM EDT last night, 6 hours after the polls closed, it had been going back and forth and I could draw no conclusion because there was no history to fall back on and I could get no commentary only the results. With one exception. There was a report that Liverpool was expected, on the basis of polls, to be 65% for “remain” and, when counted, were only 58%. That convinced me that “leave” was almost certain to win.

15

As I see this is bumped, just want to note that one of the Forex traders in the building made $41,000 in 2 hours last night cuz he stayed up and played the market JUST as the announcement happened.