[Radio_man]

The viewing figures for overnight election coverage when it’s only local elections in some area, many areas aren’t voting, and the biggest votes are being counted later, must be incredibly small, and not worth wasting the A team on.

I’m surprised there is no coverage scheduled for Saturday considering the biggest mayoral elections are declaring then

With everyone looking at cost savings, whether that are the councils or the broadcasters, I wonder if there will ever be a time when overnight counts become a thing of the past? Maybe kept just for general elections before even being discontinued with those as well.

Where I am in Wales, in 2021 we had the elections for the Welsh Parliament, and in 2022 there were Wales-wide council elections. On both occasions the results were counted during the day on the Friday, and so BBC Wales had a live results program running all afternoon and into Friday evening with Wales Today anchor Nick Servini and their political editor and various academics and commentators of Welsh Politics.
They commented during the coverage in how they'd seen the most audience engagement with their results program ever and Prof Richard Wyn Jones (Wales' answer to John Curtis) commented how much better it was for engagement in Welsh democracy for people to be able to follow the results live when everyone was awake.