It's election eve in Medway

Plus a note on our publishing schedule this week

Tomorrow, following months of campaigning, is election day in Medway.

This edition is just a quick update on how tomorrow works, and what it means for our publishing schedule this week.

Election day

Polling stations will be open in Medway tomorrow 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 Medway Council 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 in to your polling station up until polls close at 10pm. You do not need any photo ID to do this.

You may find people outside of your polling station who ask 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 Medway Council election count at Medway Park tomorrow night, getting all of the results 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 each result through the night as they come in.

For those who don’t want to spend all night sitting up checking in on individual ward results one by one, we’ll be publishing an election results report for paid supporters as soon as we have a final result. It’s hard to predict when this will be, but we expect it somewhere between 6am and 8am. Ideally, you’ll be able to browse the results at your leisure with your breakfast.

It feels a bit harsh to whack this behind the paywall, but a lot of time and effort goes into this kind of election coverage, and unfortunately, it’s only sustainable if enough readers choose to become paid supporters.

To try and mitigate this, we are currently offering a 30-day free trial to your paid subscription level for all new subscribers or those choosing to upgrade. So if you’d like to receive our election results report on Friday morning, please consider taking the offer. If you just want the results and want 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 weekly newsletter on Friday evening. This will also include a summary of the results and any interesting stories from election night, but not the ward-by-ward details.

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’s going to happen tomorrow night, but we can’t wait to cover the coming years of Medway under what administration it votes for this time around.

Finally, and with apologies to The Pogues¹:

It was Election eve online
In the Medway
An old man said to us, “it should be obvious to anyone”
And then he Facebooked a comment
A rare moderated view
We turned our screens away
And daydreamed about the count

Got on a Twitter thread
Piled on eighteen to one
We’ve got a feeling
It’s another year for fake news.

So don’t forget voter ID
We love you Medway
We can see a better time
When all our hashtags come true

They’ve got plans for rooftop bars
They’ve got riverside developments of gold
But the news goes right through you
Despite skewing young, Medway is a place for the old

When you first read our blog
On a cold election eve
You never promised us internet fame
was waiting for we.

Keevil is sarcastic
Jennings is pithy
Medway is not a city
When the Castle Concerts finished playing
They paid out for more
Jools Holland was swinging
All the drunks they were singing
We live tweeted the council 
Then blogged through the night

The boys of the Medway cabinet
Were singing come what may
We will discover what getting Brexit done
has done for Medway

You’re a liberal
You’re a snowflake
You’re bearded, woke and a newsletter you make
A political bore on a news drip depressed on the floor
Called odious or adored
Emailed “you’re ‘overtly political” or ignored
Go vote you arse
We don’t pray at full council when asked

The more diverse Labour opposition group
Still being ‘anti-Medway’
And the bells are ringing out
For another election day

We have been impartial
Well so could anyone
You took our Substack from us
When you first subscribed here
We archived all of them
Put your comments with our own
Can’t make it all alone
We built this project around you

The boys of the Local Authority
Accepting subscribers every day
And a new crowdfunder link is here
Support Medway-
-ish

Footnotes

We’re currently crowdfunding to allow us to improve our output! We hit our initial goal but would love to do more, so if you like what we do and would like to support us in exchange for some awesome rewards, take a look here. We’ve just added a snazzy Local Authority tote bag!

Albums that soundtracked the creation of this newsletter: Welcome by Slaughter Beach, Dog.

1. Why Fairytale of New York? Definitely not because Steven put a version of this together at Christmas which Ed forgot to publish, so it got handily reappropriated for this.