Once the scrutiny has been done, results have been obtained at the voting stations and these have been entered onto the relevant voting record book, the results have to be transmitted to a central venue in each constituency, or even the country as a whole, for the authorised electoral organisation to do a new count to obtain the overall results of the elections and make them official. This process is known as the consolidation of the results or, in legal terms, general scrutiny.
However, the official announcement of the results and the designation of the
corresponding seats can be a slow process. On the one hand, it requires the physical transportation of the most relevant electoral documents from all the voting stations. On the other hand, the different candidacies have to be able to dispute again all complaints and claims made at the polling station and shown in the voting record book before the electoral management body in charge (see Results Reporting).
All this means that the general scrutiny does not usually start until several days after the elections. And it is not uncommon for the official publication of the results and the taking of office for which the election was held to be delayed for over a month, even in the most developed countries.
It is evident that in all countries a social demand arises for information regarding the electoral results which is often exacerbated by these time periods. Procedures have to be established, therefore, to permit provisional, but sufficiently reliable, results to be obtained within hours after the election.
