London mayor and local elections 2012 - live polling day coverage

Rolling coverage as voters in England, Scotland and Wales go to the polls – and Boris Johnson and Ken Livingstone prepare to find out who will be London's next mayor

A man walks past a polling station in Birmingham today. Photograph: David Jones/PA

A man walks past a polling station in Birmingham today. Photograph: David Jones/PA

9.26am: Hello and welcome to today's election day live coverage. Andrew Sparrow and I will be live-blogging around the clock from today, when voters start going to the polls in local elections in England, Scotland and Wales, until late on Friday night, when we expect to find out whether Boris Johnson or Ken Livingstone will be the next mayor of London.

As well as the battle for London mayor and elections to the London assembly, which acts as a check on the mayor, there are also elections to 130 councils in England (of a total of 353), all 32 councils in Scotland, and 21 of 22 Welsh councils (elections to Anglesey Council postponed to next May).

Meanwhile two other cities are voting for an elected mayor: Salford and Liverpool.

And 10 cities will hold referendums to decide whether they should have an elected mayor: Birmingham, Bradford, Bristol, Coventry, Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, Nottingham, Sheffield and Wakefield.

My colleagues on the Datablog have put together this map that shows which councils are voting and who controls them now.

And here are details of every candidate standing in the London assembly and London mayoral elections.

A polling station at the Laycock Centre in Islington, London, this morning. Photograph: Paul Owen for the Guardian
I cast my vote this morning at a polling station in the surprisingly pretty Laycock Centre, a conference venue, in Islington, London.




Ballot papers for this year's London mayoral and London assembly elections
9.47am: The London voting system is different from that used at general elections, and seems to be causing a fair bit of confusion on Twitter.


Here is an article explaining it in full, but the key points in voting for the mayor are below.


For this contest, you can cast two votes: one vote in the first column for your first choice, the second vote in the second column for your second choice. Vote with a cross not a number.


If a candidate receives more than 50% of the first-choice votes, he or she is elected.


If not, the two candidates with the most first-choice votes - almost certainly Boris Johnson and Ken Livingstone - go to a run-off, with all the other candidates eliminated.


All the ballot papers where eliminated candidates are down as first choice are looked at again, and any second-preference votes for the top two candidates are added to the totals for those candidates.


The candidate with the most first- and second-choice votes combined wins.