EURO ELECTIONS: Voting for a party - not a candidate

EUROPEAN ELECTIONS: Voting for the party - not the candidate

PEOPLE will be going to the polls tomorrow (Thursday, May 22, 2014) to cast their vote in the European Elections.

Polling stations will be open from 7am to 10pm and people registered to vote should have had their polling card delivered through the post.

Forty-eight candidates, representing eight different party groups, will contest the South West’s Euro Parliament seats.

The South West region – which strangely includes Gibraltar – will return six MEPs to Brussels based on a proportional representation basis.

The following parties and individual candidates have been nominated:

An Independence from Europe (UKIndependence Now): David Smith; Helen Webster; Mike Camp; Andrew Edwards; Phil Dunn; John Taverner.

British National Party (Because We Can Make Britain Better): Adrian Romilly; Cliff Jones; Arnold Brindle; Wayne Peter Tomlinson; Andrew Webster; Giuseppe De Santis.

Conservative Party (For Real Change in Europe): Ashley Peter Fox; Julie McCulloch Girling; James Cracknell; Georgina Susan Butler; Sophie Swire; Melissa Maynard.

English Democrats (Putting England First): Alan England; Mike Blundell; Clive Lavelle; Barbara Wright; Steve Wright; Ray Carr.EUROPEAN ELECTIONS: Voting for the party - not the candidate

Green Party: Molly Scott Cato; Emily Rachel McIvor; Ricky Knight; Audaye Khalid Elesedy; Judy Maciejowska; Mark Chivers.

Labour Party: Clare Miranda Moody; Glyn Ford; Ann Margaret Reeder; Hadleigh Vaughan Roberts; Jude Robinson; Junab Ali.

Liberal Democrats: Graham Robert Watson; Kay Barnard; Brian George Felton Mathew; Andrew Paul Wigley; Jay Oliver Risbridger; Lyana Patricia Armstrong-Emery.

UK Independence Party (UKIP): William Dartmouth; Julia Reid; Gawain Howard Wilkinson; Tony McIntyre; Robert Lee Smith; Keith Montgomery Crawford.

People going to the polls tomorrow will be voting for a party rather than an individual candidate - unlike the "first-past-the-post" method we have in British elections where people tend to vote for the candidate rather than who they are representing.

Each party has been allowed to put up six candidates and MEPs will be allocated according to the share of the vote the party gains. Basically the larger the share of the vote a party gains, the more MEPs they are likely to win.

In the last Euro Election of 2009 the Conservatives gained 30 per cent of the South West vote and got three MEPs. UKIP won two seats and LibDems one.

Although voting will take place tomorrow, results will not be known until Sunday (May 25, 2014).

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