It’s that time of year again – Federal Liberal Youth and the Welsh organisation IR Cymru are electing the teams which will lead them through the next year. The new executives will take office on 1st November.

I am Returning Officer for the third year. Any member of the party who is under 26 or is in full-time education is eligible to vote. Everyone the party thinks fits those categories should have had an email on Sunday evening. If you haven’t, please check your Spam folder. If it’s not there, get in touch with membership department here and ask them to mark you as a Youth member.

Details of all the positions and how to apply can be found here. If you want to apply, you should provide me with the required information and an A5 sized manifesto in PDF or Word format by 8pm on Sunday 6th September. One of the first things I changed about these elections was to ensure that nominations closed at a sociable hour. The first year, they closed at midnight on a Friday night, and, given the number of places available, there were a fair few last minute nominations and queries that I had to deal with.  I am pretty pathetic at the staying up late thing, so I decided on the earlier time for future elections. 

Electronic ballots will be despatched a week later and voting will close at 8pm on 27th September.

If you want to find out more, all the job descriptions can be found in the constitution and outgoing chair Alex Harding is happy to answer any questions you might have on what it’s like being an office bearer or committee member. You can email him on [email protected] if you want to know more.

I know I’m asking for trouble here, but I wondered if any of our readers wanted to share their experience of running Liberal Youth or any of its predecessor organisations. Just try not to exceed the smut quotient set by Mark Smulian here. And don’t libel  or incriminate anyone either.

* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings. You can find her on Bluesky at caronmlindsay.bsky.social