2011 Project365 (day125)

Date: 05 May 2011 21:02:57

So the day has finally arrived, election day. South of the border there are local elections and of course the referendum on changing the voting system, but up here we also had elections to the Scottish Parliament so just one year after the shenanigans of the Westminster election we've been going through it all again. This is a picture of our polling station, a local school which would have been closed for the day. As well as the alternative vote, er, vote, we had two other ballot papers - one for our constituency MSP, and a further one for the regional list (the parliament has 70-something constituency MSPs, and a further 50-something regional MSPs). The regional list is where you vote for a party rather than a candidate specifically, there's an explanation here from an old news report from a couple of elections ago. In the 2003 election it resulted in a lot of small parties getting candidates in on the regional list; however in the most recent election in 2007 nearly all of them lost their seat and it was the main 4 or 5 parties who had most of the seats. At the gates of the polling station a bedraggled canvasser handed me a leaflet from George Galloway urging me not to waste my second vote. I can confidently assure Gorgeous George I didn't waste my second vote.