How does the voting system work?
ACROSS Glasgow there are 204 candidates seeking to be elected to the city council today.
There are 85 seats to be filled across 23 multi-member council wards.
In 16 of the wards, four councillors will be elected and in seven wards, three are chosen.
If any party is to win a majority they would need to get 43 councillors elected.
Only the SNP or Labour could achieve this with the former standing 50 candidates and the latter 43.
On the ballot paper every candidate standing in the ward is listed.
Voters do not mark their choice with an X like in most other elections. Instead, the voter ranks the candidates, with numbers, in the order they want them elected.
For your first choice you put a 1 in the box beside the candidate.
For your second preference if that candidate is not elected you mark 2. Voters can continue all the way through the list of candidates ranking each one or they can stop at any point. The voting system is called the single transferable vote.
The counting system is more complicated than the usual system.
There is a threshold of votes needed for a candidate to be elected depending on the total number of votes cast.
All the first preference votes are counted and if any of the candidates reach the threshold they are elected.
If not, the candidate with the least votes is eliminated and their votes are transferred to their second choices.
When a candidate is elected, their surplus votes (the number above the threshold) are re-allocated to the next preferences. This process continues through several stages until the total number of councillors for the ward have been elected. One way of thinking about it is there are four councillors to be elected so mark the four you like 1, 2, 3, 4. You can still rank the others. Another way is, if my first, or second or third choice doesn’t get enough votes to be elected, who would I prefer out of the others to be elected instead? And rank them in order.
Voting opens at local polling places around the city, marked on your polling card, at 7am and closes at 10pm.
Counting begins tomorrow morning and results could be known by around 4pm.