Dave, in the USA, each electoral district in the counts the votes off a machine (for the ones that use a machine), write it down on an official form and bring the form to the county Board of Elections. It's added up there. Mail in Ballots are counted after polls close and are added in.

Then each mail in ballot is checked against the names of who voted to see if there are doubles. Totals are adjusted. If someone sent in a mail in ballot & voted at the polls, the mail in vote is discarded and not counted. Then every single machine gets checked to make sure the totals reported were correct and if there were any write in votes. Then the ballots are certified. And the winners are then officially declared.

What the TV reports are exit polls they do. Those generally are close enough to say "Yes, this person won." but exact totals take more time to come in. I've worked closing polls in more than one state. For the states I don't live in, I was an "official observer". Basically, I stood there and watched & wrote down totals to check against what the poll workers recorded. In New York, poll workers work the entire day, from 6am-9pm. By the end of the day, they are tired and in a hurry to leave & times a tiny, difficult to read off the back of the machine was incorrect. It was never any error that cause the winner to change, only the first reported vote total vs. the vote that was certified.

There are 650 seats in the House of Commons and currently about 790 in the House of Lords but that figure changes as new Life Peers can be appointed. There was reform of the House of Lords a few years back and some who had been elegible are no longer so, it is no longer a case of taking up your seat when your father died and you took on the title.

http://www.parliament.uk/business/lords/whos-in-the-house-of-lords/

None of the Channel Islands have members of parliament, we have our own parliaments, we are in a position that the Scots would love, we have total control of our money. There is a member of parliament who is our link but we don't elect any of them. Our laws do have to get passed by the Privy Council and when we need an Appeal Judge then they come from the UK. Jersey has one government, Guernsey another, Alderney and Sark have their own but also come under Guernsey, for instance they use Guernsey currency and stamps.

Dave, we are talking about Members of Parliament, i.e. the House of Commons. There are 650 members and we elect them directly. The government is then formed by the party with a majority of seats (or occasionally by an alliance of parties none of which has a clear majority by itself). The leader of the largest party becomes Prime Minister; he/she forms a Cabinet each member of which is responsible for a government department.

Each parliamentary constituency is based on or in a traditional local area with some adjustment for population size. For example, Northamptonshire is a mainly rural area with a few towns of varying sizes. Northampton, the main town, has a population of over 200,000 and for elections is split into two - I live in Northampton South so that's the MP I vote for. There are several other constituencies within the county boundary, and every few years the lines between them are redrawn so that the pop. size in each remains more or less equal. However, in some areas it's just not possible to produce a constituency with that many people - the Western Isles in Scotland, for example, are a traditional area with identifiable concerns so despite a fairly low number of people they get their own MP. In Northampton, it's fairly easy to get the ballot boxes from each polling station to a central hall to be counted but in the Western Isles that's not so easy - they have to use small planes, ferries, and occasionally rowing boats to transport the boxes and that takes time. Northampton South will declare its results hours before the Western Isles because the count is easier.

Our elections are run by a local official appointed for the purpose - the returning officer. He/she is responsible for ensuring the elections are run according to law and that every polling station is conducted properly. In addition, the returning officer must be present at the count and when the votes are counted, the returning officer will announce the results. There will certainly be a representative of local media present, either a newspaper reporter and/or local tv/radio. If the constituency is of national interest e.g. where the current prime minister lives or a seat which might tip the balance between parties, it's likely that national tv will cover it. But note that our local tv stations are all part of either the BBC's network or the ITV network so they pool resources - plus in cases like elections, both the BBC and ITV will share things like TV feeds - they don't both have to send camera crews to everything.

There are 64 million people in the UK.

You might like to read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_of_the_United_Kingdom and https://www.gov.uk/government/how-government-works

So there are 650 seats for a chamber that has as many people as California and Texas alone, and that doesn't even include the other one? That delegation is only a total of 93 seats (4 Senators - as, again, 2 per state, and 89 Representatives (53 in CA and 36 in TX)), so y'all have about seven times (650 / 93 is actually 6.9892) as many seats as those two states alone...wow! Going off Sue's numbers, there are 1440 (650 + 790) seats combined for 64 million people, which averages just unde 45,000 per seat (if I am presuming correctly, which I may not)...or 15.483 times the number of seats in California and Texas' delegations between both the House and Senate!