Polling stations across the country opened at 7.00 a.m., with voting allowed until 10.00 p.m. Voters can only cast their vote at the polling station stated on the poll card.
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Voters are heading to the polls across the United Kingdom in the biggest test of political opinion since the general election.
Singer Charlotte Church has been criticised after she posted on social media that she had voted for Plaid in today’s Assembly Elections. Only those who move home before the referendum will need to make a new application to register.
In a bid to damp down expectations of Labour’s performance in the English council polls, Mr McDonnell said the party had hit an “all-time high” when the seats were last contested in 2012, in the second year of Ed Miliband’s leadership.
Voters with a disability are also being reminded by the Electoral Commission that there should be no barriers to them casting their vote on 5 May. Governing parties can do very badly in local elections and still go on to win (according to one count, Labour was nine points behind the Tories in national vote share in the 2000), but it is hard to find evidence of opposition parties going on to form a government if they do badly in the locals.
Labour will remain the biggest party in the Welsh Assembly but will lose seats, a poll on the eve of the election has suggested.
On the plus side, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland can boast a number of female party leaders, from Arlene Foster in Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), to Leanne Wood in Wales’s Plaid Cymru, to Nicola Sturgeon (SNP), Kezia Dugdale (Labour) and Ruth Davidson (Conservatives) in Scotland.
In England, there are 2,743 seats up for grabs on 124 councils and 36 areas are choosing new Police and Crime Commissioners.
Liverpool, Salford and Bristol also see mayoral showdowns.
So far this has been a bitter contest between the two main contenders, Sadiq Khan for Labour, and Conservative hopeful Zac Goldsmith.
The local elections will prove to be a litmus test for the general elections due to be held in 2020.
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Wales has had a strong record on gender representation since devolution, with 24 women and 36 men elected to the 60-seat Welsh Assembly in its first elections in 1999, and then becoming the first United Kingdom parliament to achieve a 50/50 split (30 seats each) in 2003. Mr Khan is also helped by the fact that Mr Goldsmith, the son of a billionaire, ran a lacklustre campaign.
