To elaborate on this, the entire country does this on the same day to vote in our general elections and it scales to 70m+ people without any issue. The reference to the North East and Sunderland is that they are usually the first to declare around 2 hours after the polls have closed. Most other constituencies take between 7 and 12 hours to count votes through the night.

The UK has very simple ballots, though: one bit of paper, one pile to count. America has a whole raft of issues voted at the same time, which complicates counting sufficiently that machines are more attractive.

Sorry could you expand on that a bit more? You only vote on one thing at a time?

Typically you’ll only be dealing with elections: General Election, Local Election, Mayoral Election, Regional Parliament Election, (until recently) European Parliament election.

Each of these is a different piece of paper, but on any given Election Day it’s rare (but not unheard of) to see three at once.

UK is under a parliamentary system; effectively, the only vote is to select your local representative. Everything else (who wins the Government, what issues get passed, etc.) is derived from this single point.

> UK is under a parliamentary system; effectively, the only vote is to select your local representative

That's true at the level of national government, but there are separate elections for different levels of government.

It's as if in the US you voted just for the House of Representatives, the Senate was unelected (which, get, historically it was) and the House elected the President.

Instead, the US started out with the same thing, except we elect an entire separate body (because we still didn't trust the people to do that, plus we wanted to make sure that citizens of slave states were overrepresented in executive elections as well as in the Senate) just to elect the President, and then later we decided to make the Senate accountable directly to the state electorate, too.

So you do not personally vote on (as an example) how much money goes to schools? Your representative does that voting for you. Is that correct?

You are correct. The typical voter does not vote on how much money goes to schools.

The UK is a representative democracy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_democracy).

So is the United States.