British Elections High Voter Turnout

[Update: 11:23pm - BBC is reporting that in a number of polling places people were turned away when the polls closed at 10pm and they weren't allowed to vote. But it seems they were not prepared for such a possibility and different polling places treated such voters differently. I also learned today that EU members living in UK can vote in local elections, but not the national elections.]

[Update 10:12 pm: Here's the television's exit poll report.  307 for the Conservatives, but they need 326 seats to have a majority.  255 is for Labour.  59 is Lib Dems.  29 Others.  Here's a link to the BBC coverage.]

We were in Cambridge today and the sun was glorious and I'll post some pictures soon.  But it's election day in UK and here are some photos of voting.  Above was from the Park and Ride bus leaving Cambridge to the car park where Doug's car was.

And here's Doug's polling place in Brentwood. 

These were the officials at the polling place in Brentwood.  They allowed me to take pictures, but they did ask what I was going to do with them.  When I said I had a blog in Alaska, they had no problem.

Here are the voting booths.

These are the candidates for Member of Parliament (MP) from this district.  As I said in the previous post, Pickles is the Conservative Party Chair and current MP from Brentwood. 

These are the candidates for local council.

These folks were checking people's polling numbers on their voting cards as they came in or left.  They are actually party members who are checking on who votes so they can then go out and encourage their supporters who haven't voted to go out and vote.  The woman has on a blue ribbon which indicates the Conservative Party.  The man had a yellow ribbon in his pocket and represents the Liberal Democratic Party.  I asked about the Labour Party rep and she said she'd done this four times now and there never was a Labour Party rep.  They said that voting was quite high.  That was a couple of hours ago, about 6:30pm local time.

It sounds like a lot of people hadn't made up their minds yet.  We heard from someone today that he wasn't sure if he was voting Conservative or Liberal Democrat, but he was sure he didn't want Brown any longer. 

People are expecting a Conservative minority victory and then it will be a while until they can form a government and Gordon Brown would be prime minister until a new one has been selected. 


Polls are open until 10pm (it's almost ten now) and we'll be watching the telly for a while.