I didn't expect this.
I turned up at
bard's in tears, exhausted with stress and anxiety and fatigue and uncertainty. We've been watching the clusterfuck unfold, glued to our screens, eyes darting between TV and laptop screen. I've drunk about a bottle of white wine and I have no idea how I'm going to sleep.
I came here sinking into a dread of Torygeddon, but once I got in and we turned the TV on I've realised that tonight could be far, far worse. Voters being turned away from polling stations in their hundreds, some of them having arrived at 6.30pm in the rain and waited for hours. Other polling stations stayed open to process the queues. The claim from the ones that shut - that taking the votes after 10pm would be illegal - was incorrect was, apparently, correct, a fact about which I am stunned. How can it be okay for voters who turn up before 10pm to not be served? This system is a mess.
There are stories of queues being left waiting with no word until after 10pm; of voters being brought inside the polling station and then being turned away, of ballot papers running out. In Hallam voters staged a sit in and refused to let the ballot box out of the polling station until their votes were in it; police arrived; there was an altercation and the ballot box was removed. Students were segregated into separate queues to residents, regardless of whether or not they had their polling card, and hundreds of students were turned away because the queues were being processed more slowly.
This is a fucking shambles. Britain, I am ashamed.
I am updating Twitter compulsively.
One of the seats where the voting scandal has happened is Hackney South and Shoreditch. Denny's.
I don't know how much longer I'm going to stay awake. This feels like the issues with the polling machines when Bush got re-elected. We have people in other countries as election officials and this is fucking disgusting. Where are the UN election observers?
This is the live tweet stream of a politics student in Hallam whose voting experience went from excitement to outrage as she was denied her vote.
If there's a legal challenge in Hallam, Nick Clegg's constituency, then the result is suspended and Clegg won't be able to participate in a coalition until it's resolved.
So far it looks like Cleggmania faded before the vote, but that's not important; the important thing is the travesty of riot police dispersing crowds of disenfranchised voters staging a sit in. I am fucking furious.