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How will this map and table change tonight and tomorrow? – politicalbetting.com
How will this map and table change tonight and tomorrow? – politicalbetting.com
Current Control of Counils up for Election Today:Majority Control:CON: 87LAB: 49LDM: 17Others: 4Minority Control:CON: 24LAB: 19LDM: 12GRN: 2Others: 16 pic.twitter.com/mhYH3SVoel
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I guess there's no equivalent of an exit poll or any kind of indication at 10 pm?
Also wondering if the BBC are still going to do their local to national equivalence voting poll?
Note that lion's share of returned ballots that are "challenged" by election workers, get flagged for one of two reasons:
> missing signature = failure to sign the required voter oath on outside of return ballot envelope.
> mismatched signature = sig provided does NOT match one on file with voters registration record.
Don't have exact figures, but county-by-county typical challenge rate is about 1% - 2%. And of ballots challenged, more than half are typically cured by voters submitting required sigs or other info.
For some info, including real-time statistics from April 2023 special election in King County, check out this link
https://kingcounty.gov/depts/elections/results/ballot-return-statistics/2023/202302.aspx
My own voting experience (8:15am): one teller (Con) outside chatting to a polling clerk - the teller only asked me which of the two wards at that polling station I was in.
Presented poll card with driving licence to make it easier for the clerk, ID check seemed to be perfunctory but perhaps not waiting to be asked for ID speeded it up.
Abstained on the grounds of all candidates standing for parties that were members of either the current useless administration or the previous equally useless administration, both of which have eagerly supported one particular disastrous policy which has made residents' lives miserable.
Seattle Times ($) - Culprit revealed in Bainbridge Island ferry grounding
Contaminated fuel is the culprit behind last month’s dramatic grounding of the ferry Walla Walla on Bainbridge Island.
The source of the bad fuel, and whether it came from an outside vendor or was dirtied onboard, is still under investigation, said Ian Sterling, spokesperson for the Washington State Ferries. No other ships were affected.
The fuel seems to have clogged the filters leading into the boat’s generators, answering the question of why the redundancies built into the ferry’s systems didn’t prevent the crash. According to Sterling, when one generator went down, a second also failed almost immediately. A third generator takes more time to fire up, which the crew instead used to ready for impact.
The Walla Walla returned to service in Bremerton on Wednesday, just two weeks after its failure. Engineers removed all fuel onboard and cleaned out the tanks, said Sterling. They also attached remote monitors to the generators so that crews might notice a failure more quickly in the future.
The hull was scratched but not damaged. The propeller needed to be bent back into place, which workers underwater were able to do without lifting the boat onto dry dock.
The generators that failed power the onboard lights as well as the controls, which is why the engine still worked but crews lost steering. They stalled just as the ship was entering Rich Passage from Bremerton, on its way to Seattle, when it should have made a nearly 90-degree right turn. The result was a slow drift into the south end of Bainbridge Island, where the vessel and its passengers sat for more than five hours.
“It happened at the worst possible second,” Sterling said.
No injuries were reported. Passengers, after trying to make the best of their time aboard with photo shoots and food from the galley, were eventually offloaded onto Kitsap Transit fast ferries.
The grounding came just as lawmakers in Olympia were considering a budget for ferry maintenance and preservation. Nearly half of the 21-boat fleet is over 40 years old, and three boats are due for retirement in short order.
Legislators also passed a bill making it easier for the state to solicit out-of-state bids for new ferry construction, a stark change from the in-state work currently conducted. Despite concerns from local builders and unions, lawmakers said it’s a necessary change if the state hopes to bring new boats online in a timely and affordable manner.
In other clown-show news, Musk appears to have broken Twitter again.
Maybe BBC politics will have it on their Web site
It's long been a swing Council.
Got some very strongly Labour wards of high deprivation and high minority population.
And some extremely wealthy villages which wouldn't be out of place in the Home Counties.
Turns on a few swing wards between the two.
Perhaps they know something the rest of us don't?
Making him PPC is bound to have wound up loads of the locals, so it's tough to see him surviving.
Note that in about 99% of election races, the final winners & losers are known on Election Night, because the margin is too sizeable to be overturned. And in most of the rest, the end result is clear within a few days.
Only the very closest races still hanging fire. Which by definition deserve careful canvassing NOT a hurry-hurry-tell-us-NOW approach.
I assume he will lose his PPC
Could lose a dozen or more councils though, with some NOCs going Lab/LD. Labour ought to have a good night.
https://news.sky.com/story/revealed-how-the-conservatives-plan-to-use-keirs-starmers-past-against-him-at-the-next-election-12867654?dicbo=v2-Ohpa522
Someone actively involved in the campaign who knows what they are doing, take it seriously (if you are confident it isn't deliberate expectations management)
https://www.eveningnews24.co.uk/news/23481650.norwich-conservative-leaflet-says-voter-id-not-needed/
'The leaflet, which was distributed to encourage people to vote Conservative, said: “You don’t need to take any ID in order to vote, so long as you are registered.”'
Even the postal's are only about 50% round here!
https://twitter.com/GuidoFawkes/status/1654125831852285952?t=V3xbiUQmKvC_YhgLp_Rfbw&s=19
The one time Labour won a by-election in it, from third, I congratulated the Labour candidate on the way in to the count, before any boxes were open, and told the Tories, who always hoped to win their old ward back, that they weren't anywhere near.
Mind you, they both seem surprised how I could be so certain; maybe it is a special knack that only LibDems have?
Im hoping for the meh resuklt at best but would not be surprised if it's much worse for the blues. What it means for the GE who knows.
The Coronation will swiftly kick any news into the long grass apoart from places like this but we should perhaps remind ourselves more frequently how niche we are.
I would absolutely turn up for a GE.
As for the lack of overnight results, is it councils not being able to afford the overtime?
Dashed bad show if it is that.
https://manchestermill.co.uk/p/a-scandal-on-polling-day-have-stockport
But hang on, how did he know about their strong showing? Or as Andy, one of our members, asked in the comments: “How do Stockport Labour know what’s in the postal votes in Edgeley? I didn’t think they were meant to be opened/counted until the count begins.”
Good question. We’ve been trying to work out what happened here, and it seems like the Labour official in Stockport may well have broken electoral law.
Verification process.
Cough.
That's Tories losing control of Antibes District Council nailed on then.
Presently my system looks like a winner for the north east.
My polling station had unprecedented turnout at 7am. This may indicate a record turnout nationwide, or it may indicate my wife and I are going out for dinner later so had to vote first thing. You decide.
Yet fraud should not be undetectable. While the system as now could allow someone to vote for someone else, if it was happening even on a minimal scale, in some cases people would find on turning up at polling stations that their vote had already been cast. Unless you could be certain that someone was not going to vote, some such cases of attempted double voting would be bound to come to light. The cases would be detected retrospectively and a report of potential fraud submitted in each case by electoral officers. Likewise, sample cross checks with registers of deaths against the marked register would be able to find that find that some dead people had apparently voted. But the retrospective evidence for any of that happening is also almost non-existent. The evidence is that the system on polling day is not broken.
So I think the undetectable cases would boil down to a very few ones almost all involving collusion by the person casting a vote and the person whose vote is being cast, so essentially proxy votes cast by unofficial means. Maybe a daughter voting for a bed bound mother (it could hardly be the father.) And even then, those few votes would be cast in an essentially random way, some for Conservatives, some for Labour etc, in such a way that the randomness all but cancels them out. No way could that distort the outcome of elections in any meaningful way, in which case there is no problem.
Compare that to the effect of putting in place proof of identity requirements that 2 million people can't meet, and specifically applying those exclusions to groups whose voting patterns are going to be quite skewed. Those under pensionable age (i.e. without concessionary bus passes.) Those who have no current or old passports (so likely to be young and/or unable to afford to travel abroad.) Those who don't have access to a car (and households without a car is a very good predictor of poverty.) Basically all demographics likely to be heavily skewed to Labour.
Make no mistake. Voter suppression, big time, by the Conservative Party.
A bit further north is proper blue wall at the GE level, of course, but there are smatterings of Greens and indies, and it's not that long since the LibDems did really well there at the local level.
Lots of mostly necessary technicalities. Which are NOT necessarily as obvious as folks who have NOT actually observed ballot processing and vote counting in detail - as opposed to campaigning, betting, commenting or otherwise engaging in politics.
Most political activists AND candidates of my own acquaintance, know a great deal about politics and campaigning. And are mostly ignorant about actual electoral procedure.
It's every bit as bent as it would be if Labour disqualified anyone with a big house.
My feeling is Tobias E will be in major trouble next time. He is going to need all the help he can get....
One interesting choice is allowing votes which arrive after election day to be counted if postmarked on that day, which will add a couple of days on to finalisation even if you count the rest quickly of course.
I said as much today to the two tellers , one Labour and one Lib Dem . They need to come to some agreement . Number one priority is to rid the country of the Tories .
I believe they only have 7 councillors now. 6 are in just one enclave and I expect all those will be lost. Only possible gains are if the LD Indie vote is split as the Indies are challenging all the LDs this time. They didn't have the candidates last time. Where they did was in the rural wards and here their vote was huge.
Via personal face time. Which few journos, politicos, bloggers or PBers ever do.
Normally the counting is done quite quickly in the early hours i.e. verify the total number of ballot papers, then sort into piles for each candidate, count the piles, check the spoilt ballot pile, declaration, go home to bed. This time, you have to separately count up to 3 separate votes on each ballot paper from maybe three or more times that number of candidates. I have no idea about the process, other than it's going to take an awfully long time. No wonder they are not starting until Friday after breakfast.
A confounding factor, in the locals at least, is likely to be the Greens, who have been making progress in this area for some time.
One of the things that will be of interest is whether local pacts, agreements or understandings among anti-Conservative parties will enable tactical voting on a scale which augments Conservative losses. Splitting the anti-Conservative vote is more likely to save Conservative Council seats than any "Rishi Bounce".
It's hardly only Corbynites who get even major details wrong, and even those with experience of the process will get some stuff wrong. My favourite remains that some people who have been involved in elections for decades still believe that doing a tick instead of a cross, or drawing a penis in the box, will automatically invalidate your vote - I was told that on here. It really won't (though with the penis it would almost certainly depend where it is). When the party reps have a look at the questionable ballots and the official declares their judgement I've never see the reps object to a penis vote for their opponent. Probably as they know they might benefit one day.
The Electoral Commission guidance on acceptable ballots based on case law includes some that are surprising to me though.
They would also be my first and last canvass streets to see if the campaign had any impact.
https://beyondthetopline.substack.com/p/forget-the-party-spin-what-does-history
Tl:dr (and it is quite a long article): Labour need a lead in the national equivalent vote of around 10% to be on track for a small majority at the GE, 12% to 14% for a comfortable majority, or 15%+ to be in landslide territory.
It may prove quite the self defeating measure.