‘Local Elections Day‘

I found myself wide awake rather earlier than usual this morning, so after a refreshing mug of tea, decided to go for a gentle early morning run.  A couple of slightly circuitous laps round the park and to and from the house make up 5k and my route to the park took me past the church hall transformed for the day into our local polling station. 

At just after 7.30, it had only been open half a hour and was very quiet - no doubt it will pick up during the day, and of course more and more people have a postal vote. However, rather than interrupt my run I’ll be voting later.

Here in Scotland, local council elections are conducted - like elections for the Scottish Parliament at Holyrood - by a system of proportional representation. Confusingly, though, it’s a different version of PR, called a Single Transferable Vote (STV).

STV involves ranking candidates - as many or as few as you like - in order of preference, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 etc.  

Because votes transfer, you don’t need to vote tactically. You can give your genuinely most preferred candidate your number 1 vote, even if they don’t have much chance of winning, as your vote can still help to elect someone else.

So you can vote for as many as you’re comfortable with and by doing so won’t “harm” your first preference candidate by marking later ones. 

In fact it’s important to use as many preferences as you can, because it might make the difference between someone you like being elected over someone you really don’t. Later preferences only matter if the candidate your vote is with is elected or eliminated.

And it means you can and keep giving preferences until you get to candidates you absolutely cannot stomach - “Vote till you Boke” in other words - since, even if you don’t like a candidate, if you’d prefer to see them elected ahead of someone else, you can give them one of your later preferences without affecting your earlier ones.

I have my own order of preferences, but one thing I’m sure of I’ll be stopping giving them when I reach the Tories!

My run then took me past the pond, where Josephine the swan is still waiting patiently for her eggs to hatch! (See extra)