Was the postal vote battle the real decider?

This table appears in the Evening Standard tonight and shows the number of postal votes issue in all but three of London’s boroughs.

The total is 559,892 and I’ve just been doing some quick calculations to compare the number with a selection of the number of votes cast four years ago. For comparison I took the total first preferences from 2004 for Norris and Livingstone and then expressed this data as a percentage.

In more than half the boroughs the proportion of postal votes issued compared with the Livingstone-Norris total in 2004 was over 50%. In one borough, Hackney it was only a few hundred short of 100% though that is probably due to the all postal vote election there in the last borough contests.

Next in line came Sutton with 75% then Tower Hamlets and Southwark both on 65%. Newham was 64% with Islington on 61%. The other boroughs above 50% were Bexley, Camden, Greenwich, Havering, Kingston, Lambeth, Lewisham, Richmond, Waltham Forest and Wandsworth.

Remember this is not the proportion of the electorate but from the total of Tory and Labour votes in the Mayoral race in 2004.

Voting continues until 10pm and it will be early evening tomorrow before we get the result.

Dealing with tonight’s traffic: The site will shortly go into election night slimmed down mode to limit the demands on the server. Only the two most recent posts will appear though you can click back to get earlier ones. Continuation threads will start at regular intervals. Please switch to the new thread as soon as that happens.

Mike Smithson