Nomination Day

The nominations paper were handed in at 11 o'clock this morning. We were the first. They were accepted as valid. Also handed in was the £5000 deposit (which we'll get back if we get 2.5% of the votes cast).

One anomaly is that, being a list election, the full registered name of the parties contesting will appear on the ballot paper as well as any variant of their names they may have used on the nomination papers. We used, as in previous elections, "The Socialist Party (GB)", so both our full name and the variant will appear on the ballot paper. But this is how the Electoral Commission and the Returning Officers have decided to interpret the law. If we had chosen to put our full name this would have appeared twice.

Another anomaly -- in fact a stupidity -- is that the full registered name of the parties contesting will determine the order on the ballot paper in which the lists appear. But "The" is to count as the first word where this is included in the registered name, as it will be for most parties. So nearly all the lists will be under T. Another Electoral Commission and Returning Officers decision. Now if we'd called ourselves Aardwark Socialist Party then we'd be first . . .