This Thursday (5th May 2011) is election day. We’ll be out and about reporting on what happens both on polling day and when the votes from the ballot boxes are counted on Friday. However, a massive counting operation is already underway. Tens of thousands of postal votes need to be verified and counted in the days before the election, and election staff are already hard at work checking the postal votes. This is an important part of the election process that we’ve never seen before, and probably like most of you we’ve never really thought about it. So when the rest of the counting begins at 10am on Friday morning, we’ll be remembering that many thousands of votes have already been carefully checked.