The count for the Mayor of London and the members of the London Assembly is now underway in Olympia, ExCel and Alexandra Palace.
Once again, the electorate have had to cope with not one but three different voting systems.
Mayor of London
There are seven candidates for the Mayor of London, with Brian Paddick standing for the Liberal Democrats.
Voters had the opportunity to mark a first and a second preference candidate on the ballot paper. If one candidate achieves more than 50% of the first preference votes then that person is elected. If, as is more likely, no candidate passes the 50% threshold, then the two candidates with the most first preferences go forward to the next stage and all the others are eliminated. The second preferences of the eliminated candidates are then redistributed. At the second stage the winner is whichever of the top two candidates has the greater number of first and second preferences. (This is a variation of AV)
London Assembly
Photo of City Hall under Creative Commons license from Freefoto.com
25 members are elected to the London Assembly in an all-in, all-out election every four years.
Of these:
- 14 represent constituencies. These members are elected using First Past the Post on a second ballot paper.
- 11 are London-wide members. On a third ballot paper, electors can vote for one party list, and this determines the proportionality of seats on the Assembly. The 11 additional places are allocated to the parties so that the overall proportions of the 25 members reflects the voting pattern on this ballot paper.
In the last London elections Liberal Democrats secured three places from the party list. Caroline Pidgeon has served as the group leader, and is top of the list this time round.
Where to see the results
You can follow the live updates on the count on London Elects.
Update
4.30pm: Boris Johnson is ahead of Ken Livingstone on first preferences, with Jenny Jones (Green), Brian Paddick and Siobhan Benita (Independent) very close together in third place. Most of the votes are in, except for the areas being counted at Alexandra Palace.
In the London-wide vote, it is difficult to judge the exact percentages from the barchart, but Labour is first, followed by Conservative, Green, Lib Dem and UKIP. The BNP appears to be out of the running.
5.30pm: Conservatives have been elected in Bexley & Bromley, Croydon & Sutton, Havering & Redbridge, Merton & Wandsworth and West Central. Labour candidates have been elected in Ealing & Hillingdon, Greenwich & Lewisham and Lambeth & Southwark. Six constituencies have not yet declared. See the results here.
7.15pm: Two more constituency results - Conservatives win in South West and Labour win in City & East.
7.30pm: According to the BBC, have declared the figures for the Mayoral vote and these put the first preferences for the candidates as follows - Boris Johnson 46.45%, Ken Livingstone 37.98%, Brian Paddick 4.15%, Jenny Jones 4.06%, Siobhan Benita 3.76%.
Open thread
Please use the comments below to report and give your opinion on the London results.
If you'd like to comment on the local elections outside London please drop in on the lively local elections open thread that started last night.
Over to you again...
* Mary Reid is a contributing editor on Lib Dem Voice. She was a councillor in Kingston upon Thames, where she is still very active with the local party, and is the Hon President of Kingston Lib Dems.
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21 Comments
They seem to be making good progress with the counting – and it’s only 10 am. So how come it’s going to take all day and into the evening to get the results?
A power cut at Ally Pally means the start of the Barnet and Camden (and other) counts has been delayed by at least 2 hours
Ah! I thought there was a definite North London pattern to which boroughs were somewhat behind on the London Elects website!
More info here.
http://www.times-series.co.uk/news/9689181.Ally_Pally_vote_counting_behind_schedule/?ref=rss
Early London results are a disaster for us. We may be squeezed into fourth place in the London-wide vote and Brian has a tough battle for 3rd/4th/5th place in the mayoral election. London will offer no solace from the bloodbath elsewhere.
No surprise if you re-field a candidate seen as a grey man last time and a specialist in only one facet of the Mayor’s many responsibilities. I know it offends other grey people’s grey souls, but we’d have got way more coverage and way more votes fielding that maverick wasting asset, Lembit – who could have been given a useful job of work to do instead of making an ‘ahse’ of himself wrestling or whatever it is this week.
The voting system is supplementary vote – not a variation on Alternative vote but an even worse system.
If only the Lib Dems had pushed for STV mayoral and assembly elections instead of for a referendum on AV.
From the BBC:
“Boris Johnson is in the lead in the race for City Hall, as the first votes in the London mayoral race are counted.
… the picture may change over the day as different boroughs’ votes are processed.
Ken Livingstone is running second, followed by the Greens’ Jenny Jones, independent Siobhan Benita then Lib Dem Brian Paddick, on first preferences.
The site also shows Labour ahead of the Tories in the London Assembly vote.
The Green Party are running in third, with the Lib Dems fourth …”
@Caracatus: AV is just STV with single member constituencies. Unless you are proposing that there should be multiple Mayors of London, STV would just amount to AV (which you imply you dislike).
Put another way, PR is by definition impossible for mayoral, presidential and similar elections. It’s impossible for the number of Mayors of London of each party to be proportional to the vote for each party, unless London were to be run not by a single Mayor or London, but instead by some kind of ‘Mayoral Committee’ that replaced the current post of Mayor. We could even come up with a snappy name for the Mayoral Committee – I dunno, we could call it a ‘council’ 🙂
I don’t understand why the mayoral elections use SV though – a system that is clearly designed to simplify the process of manual counting.
roy
@David I suspect this result has very little to do with the candidate we fielded, who is very good. Lembit is a joke and would do our party’s credibility no good whatsoever.
Which is, Liberal Neil, presumably why he appears to be under-performing the Assembly candidates, despite the fact that – unlike in their case – you could vote for him and still express a second preference.
Thge reason Brian Paddick is underperforming the Assembly candidates is entirely due to the highly-polarised media -dominated head-to-head between Boris and Ken. Nothing at al lto do with Brian’s qualities which I believe have improved over the past 4 years.
Now we should adopt a policy of a referendum on abolition of the GLA and Mayor. The rest of the country has seen this system for the failure it is. Let Londonm rid itself of his pointless expensive albatross.
“Now we should adopt a policy of a referendum on abolition of the GLA and Mayor.”
After getting only 4% in the mayoral election? That might not be the most brilliant timing.
Sorry to see Brian Paddick beaten into fourth place. He has always seemed decent and sincere. Jenny Jones did run a good campaign, though.
Chris …it’s the policy we should have had for this election..
With two assembly members elected we must have received about 10 per cent of the assembly vote. Does anyone know the exact figure?
As a Greater London resident, I would vigorously oppose any attempt to do away with the GLA, England’s only operating elected Regional Government, representing more people than the citizens of Scotland or Switzerland. In the Thatcherite gloom, after Ken Livingstone tweaked Mrs. T’s tail too often and got the GLC abolished to teach him a lesson, Londonwide services were either handled by by Whitehall or unelected quangos.
Tony Blair deliberately hampered the GLA by devolving limited powers. Meanwhile, Gordon Brown forced PFI schemes on the Tube (one of which has since collapsed). In spite of that it has done a job, and probably could usefully have more powers.
The GLA is a bit like the EU. It’s far from perfect, but it has roles that nobody else would do and does jobs that others can’t do as well.
And it’s not nearly as costly to run as its opponents make out
@Ian
“They seem to be making good progress with the counting – and it’s only 10 am. So how come it’s going to take all day and into the evening to get the results?”
They started at 8 am Friday. Counting each constituency is fairly easy, though they are each the size of about 5 Westminster constituencies. Then the constituency can be declared in the hall. This time the mechanics worked well, and they used experienced counting staff from the boroughs. They have always used machinery to read the A4 ballot papers (3 per voter). The very first time they had real trouble with the transport of ballott papers through the readers. Last time they got the hardware and software right, but used too many agency staff.
This time it ran smoothly.
The Mayoral and List totals for each constituency was done with the constituency counts. The numbers from the outlying count venues (3 or 4) were then sent to City Hall. Only when all the counts from constituencies were at City Hall could the final calculation for Mayor be done; this time the second preferences had to included to give the result.
ONLY after the winning constituency assembly members parties were ALL known, could the de Hondt system be applied to the London-wide list totals to determine who got the top-up seats.
So problems at one outlying count venue – Alexandra Palace – inevitably delayed the results for mayor and list. In spite of this, the timing of the last results was not worse than last time. Without the power outage it would have been appreciably earlier.
The London Mayor and list GLA members are elected by the biggest single electorate in United Kingdom.
I agree with David’s view of Lembit. We need to make better use of the assets we have.
I’ll agree that Lembit is wasting his undoubted talents, but it was quite a long time ago that he crossed the line from being colourful (fine – helps people remember who you are) to being a bit ridiculous (many people won’t then vote for you for a serious job).
Given that he had only previous contact with London as a way-out-of-town MP, it is no wonder that he failed at the first hurdle – getting London members to accept him.
Brian is not as grey as implied, but his is very careful and self-disciplined – as you’d expect from anyone who had held an important management post. And he is, like Ken Livingstone, a Londoner through and through.
It is interesting to see how people respond to defeat at the polls, or finding themselves under a bit of a cloud, both at the parliamentary and council level. Some have a complete change, some take a break, some give up on politics or party entirely, but many work on, either to come back or to take a different, even lower, role in their party. Which is Lembit doing? Where is his future launch pad, if he wants to get back into LibDem politics?