Elections May 1997
About the Hantsweb Election Results Service
County Council Elections | Results Service | UK General Election LinksThe County Council Elections
On 1st May 1997, the people of Hampshire went to the polls to elect a new County Council to take Hampshire into the next millenium. A county councillor was elected for each of seventy-four electoral divisons across the county to serve until May 2001. These elections were the first to be held on the new boundaries of the County Council which came into effect when Portsmouth and Southampton became unitary authorities on 1st April 1997.
County councillors are the representatives of the people of Hampshire and are responsible for setting the council's budget and making its policy, as well as overseeing the work of the council's paid staff.
Elections 1997 Homepage
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The Results Service
Because of the UK General Election, most of the county election votes weren't counted until the morning and afternoon of Friday, 2nd May. Usually counting takes place in the late evening soon after the polls have closed. During the day Internet users were able to see up-to-the-minute updates of the results as they were received at the County Council HQ at The Castle, Winchester.
For those interested in the technical details, the votes were counted by the Deputy Returning Officers around the county who sent them in to the County Council's HQ in Winchester as soon as they were declared. There they were entered into the County Elections System (CES), an Oracle database running on an IBM mainframe computer which is part of Hampshire County Council's HANTSNET information network. As each result was entered, a program automatically generated an HTML page containing the result together with new versions of the overall summary and results in order of arrival pages. These were immediately sent to the Hantsweb server via standard Internet FTP (File Transfer Protocol).
For the majority of users with modern browsers, the summary and results by arrival pages were set to refresh automatically every minute, thus ensuring that if a result had arrived the user would have been automatically notified of the change at the next refresh.
Elections 1997 Homepage
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UK General Election Links
On 1st May, as well as the county council elections in Hampshire, the whole United Kingdom went to the polls to elect a new Parliament and to decide which party or parties would form the next government of the UK. We have assembled some links below to some of the many excellent websites that sprang up to cover the General Election, the campaigning in the weeks before, and the results. We hope you will find them useful. Don't forget to bookmark our county elections page before you go!
NB it is possible that some of these websites will close down now that the election is over. if you find any of these links have expired, please let our Web Manager know.
| Specialist Sites | Media Coverage | |
|---|---|---|
 Election 97 |
BBC |
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Engender: Women and the General Election |
ITN
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| GE97 |
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| Scotland's General
Election |
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| UK
Politics from Keele University |
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| NB: Inclusion of a pointer to another organisation's site does not constitute a recommendation or endorsement of that organisation or site by Hampshire County Council. | ||
Elections 1997 Homepage
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