General Election Results for Melton and Syston

On 4th July, the Nation went to the polls and Stn along with other local and national media, attended the count in Melton Mowbray. It was interesting to view the process in action, it takes a lot of people and organisation to verify and then count all the voting papers that arrived from all the voting stations across this new constituency. As we reported last month, Syston has moved into a new parliamentary constituency after the Boundary Commission divided the former Charnwood Constituency into three. The new constituencies are Loughborough, Melton & Syston and Mid Leicestershire. These constituencies are only used for General Elections. The Charnwood Borough Council still exists along with the other Borough and District councils. They are not affected by parliamentary Constitutional Boundaries.
It was a long night, but an exciting one at that from the initial flurry of ballot boxes arriving and the papers being verified into bundles of 25 ready to be officially counted. It is at this point, any of the candidates and their teams can watch with clipboards and try and mark any vote they see for their candidate, you may have seen this on the TV coverage at other areas. Once all the voting slips have been verified, which at Melton was about 1.45am, the actual counting of votes began and the hall became quiet and the bundles of 25 slips are distributed to the people counting them quickly and carefully putting the slips into trays named for each candidate. This is when the tension began to build and candidates and their teams waited in anticipation for the outcome.
There were nine stations at Melton, as each station finished their allocated voting slips, any spoilt papers were removed from the count, verified again and recorded by the returning officers team.
The results of the Melton and Syston Constituency were announced at about 4.45am and are as follows:
Edward Argar, Conservative; 17,526.
Zafran Khan, Labour; 12,130.
Pete Morris, Reform UK; 8,945.
Alastair McQuillan, Green; 3,685.
Andy Konieczko, Liberal Democrat; 2,547.
Marilyn Gordon, Independent; 517.
Teck Khong, ADF; 348.
Matt Shouler, Rejoin EU; 288.
Therefore, Edward Argar, Conservative was duly elected as Member of Parliament for Melton and Syston Constituency with a majority of 5,396.
The turn out was 61.9%, a reduction of 4.8% since on the 2019 Election.
Needless to say we were all rather tired by the end of the experience and it’s along time since your editor left home in the dark on one day and arrived home again the following morning with the sun rising!