"The total number of votes given to each candidate in alphabetical order were as follows:..." or should that be 'was'?

The phrase "the total number of votes" can usually take either singular or plural aggreement, with different dialects splitting the usage differently depending on context. However, there is something else going on here. The predicate "given to each candidate" clearly requires that there are more than one "total number of votes". So plural is strongly indicated. While the construction is entirely idiomatic as written, there is an option available to make the plural choice more obvious. One could use numbers instead of number.

the total numbers of flights by different airlines between two specific cities in the past month ...

From Chegg Study textbook Solutions

...

the total numbers of bacteria in different samples tested ...

From Annual Report of the Storrs Agricultural Experiment Station ..., Issue 15

From Parliamentary Papers, House of Commons and Command, Volume 51

Native speakers are surprisingly incompetent grammarians when it comes to the subject-verb agreement, especially when it's spoken English. I suspect this is one of those cases where 'were' is erroneously used instead of 'was'.

Specifically, the grammatical number of the subject 'The total number of votes given to each candidate in alphabetical order' is determined by the singular 'number', but the speaker mistakenly felt that the plural 'votes' determines its grammatical number due to the rather long intervening participial phrase 'given to each candidate in alphabetical order'.

That said, 'were' could have been used in a different sentence:

" ...The total numbers of votes given to the candidates in alphabetical order were as follows:xxx,41;xxx, 46; ...".