It's election day in Medway
Plus a note on our how our results coverage will work
Today, following weeks of campaigning, is election day in Medway and across the country.
This edition is just a quick update on how things work today and what our coverage will look like.
Election day
Polling stations will be open today from 7am until 10pm.
If you have received your polling card, you should know where you need to go to cast your ballot. If you are registered to vote but haven’t received your polling card, you do not need it to vote. Go to your polling station, confirm your name and address, and you will be allowed to vote, so long as you have an accepted form of photo ID. All voters will need to bring a form of photo ID in this election regardless.
If you do not know where your polling station is located, you can visit the Where Do I Vote? website, enter your postcode, and they will, for lack of a better term, tell you where to go.
If you have a postal vote but did not remember to return it in time, you can drop it off at any polling station in your constituency until the polls close at 10pm. You do not need a photo ID to do this, but you must fill out a form when doing so.
If you have not received your postal vote ballot papers, you should contact Medway Council immediately on 01634 332030 to arrange a replacement ballot paper, which you will have to collect from Gun Wharf.
If you were due to vote in a polling station today but can not make it due to a work or medical emergency or have lost your ID, you can call Medway Council on 01634 332030 to arrange an emergency proxy vote. You can do this until 5pm today.
You may find people outside your polling station asking to see your polling card. These people are activists for political parties, and you absolutely do not have to engage with them.
Polling stations will close at 10pm, which brings us to…
Our coverage
As ever, we will be at the election count at Medway Park tomorrow night, getting the results as they come in.
We will be at the election count at Medway Park tonight, getting the results for each of Medway’s three constituencies as they come in.
Long-time veterans of Medway elections will know to find us over on our Twitter account, where we’ll be tweeting brief updates throughout the night. We’ll also post updates in our Substack Chat for our paid supporters, so feel free to join us there.
For those who don’t want to spend all night sitting up, we’ll publish election results and analysis for paid supporters as soon as we have a final result. It’s hard to predict when this will happen, but we expect it to be around 6am. Ideally, you’ll be able to browse the results at your leisure with your breakfast. Our usual Friday edition will still be available for all readers later in the day, including further analysis of the results.
Putting this behind the paywall feels harsh, but a lot of time and effort goes into this kind of election coverage. Unfortunately, it’s only sustainable if enough of our readers choose to become paid supporters.
To try and mitigate this, we are currently offering a 30-day free trial to any paid subscription level for all new subscribers or those choosing to upgrade. So, if you’d like to receive our election results report tomorrow morning, please consider taking the offer. If you want our results and analysis and choose to unsubscribe after that, you can absolutely do that. But we hope you’ll consider supporting a new way of producing independent journalism for Medway and stick around a bit longer.
All subscribers, free or paid, will receive the usual Friday edition later in the day. This will also include a summary of the results and interesting news from election night.
As always, thank you so much for reading Local Authority and sticking with us through this very politics-heavy time. We have no idea what will happen tonight, but regardless of the outcome, we’ll be there, as always, covering it the best we can.