Thursday is polling day across Manchester, where because of the ward boundary changes all the council seats are up for election.
This means you have three votes instead of the usual one – use them to re-elect your Labour councillors, Aftab Razaq, Angeliki Stogia and Mary Watson. Five things to remember:
This year’s local elections are on Thursday 3rd May. If you think you may be away, or busy, on polling day, you can register for a postal vote. It’s easy to do, but the deadline is Wednesday 18th April.
The Labour Party has provided an online tool to make it simple to apply – you can find it here.
Have you recently moved into the local area? Or just turned eighteen years old? Be sure you don’t lose the right to vote in this year’s local elections, which are on Thursday 4 May. The deadline to register is Tuesday 17 April.
Under the system of Individual Electoral Registration, each person is responsible for making sure that they are on the electoral register – you can’t assume that someone else will do it for you. The good news is that using the internet it’s a very quick process (it takes less than five minutes). Just go to gov.uk/register-to-vote. Or for questions and answers about voter registration, see our previous post here.
Under eighteen but over sixteen? Although you can’t vote until you’re eighteen you can still register now, so you won’t have to do it later.
You may know already that local government ward boundaries in Manchester are set to change – we wrote a previous post about this before. This means a number of important changes are about to happen, from who your elected representatives are to how the Labour Party is organised in the city generally, but particularly in Whalley Range. The process is potentially quite confusing, so we have prepared a ‘question-and-answer’ panel which will hopefully address some of the queries raised. Feel free to ask any more questions though, using the comments section. Continue reading
Polls are open now until 10pm. As well as Afzal, good luck to all our Labour candidates and campaigners in and around Manchester and across the country. For more information about how to vote, see the previous post.