Voting Chaos

Whilst I was lucky enough to cast my vote at approximately 8:20am in a horrendously long queue of, um, 3 people, unfortunately the same could not be said as I waited with Sam to vote in Ranmoor, Sheffield. We took a detour to the polling station to walk by Nick Clegg's office, making sure to take Belly the travelling, photogenic devil with us (fortunate enough to have met Jimmy Carr). All we found were three men eating outside, so we headed to the polling station and joined the painfully long queue at 6:30pm, only to discover that we'd missed Nick Clegg by minutes! Oh how close we were to pressing Belly upon him and demanding a photo!

Now it was pretty clear that this was a longer than average polling queue, however we did NOT expect to still be there 2.5 hours later, unsure as to whether Sam would even get to cast his vote. It was a good thing we joined the queue when we did really, as another half an hour would have buggered that up! Inside was absolute chaos, and without just going ahead and taking your card to someone, regardless of who was in front of who, you could have spent another 40 odd minutes in there! No wonder there was such chaos come 10pm!

It was pretty damn frustrating watching them allow "residents" to form a shorter queue; I watched a short interview this morning with a man who had been the last person allowed to vote at Ranmoor, and he'd only waited 40 mins, whilst students who queued for 3 hours were unable to vote! How the hell is that fair?! One very kind woman dished out biscuits and juice along the line, bless her. I didn't notice any of these passed on to the resident line, mind... By the time we'd got inside though, the lines just merged into one giant mush, and once in the room with a measley 3 voting booths (even little old Wingerworth had at least 4!) it just turned into a big push for ballot paper. This was the point I decided to step aside, since I was not voting here, and overheard several complaints, including requests to speak to someone on the phone to get more help in; the returning officer claimed to have phoned as early as 4pm and had been refused help.

After eventually pushing our way out of the building to a giant camera flash and into the pouring rain, through a hopeless queue at least another hour and a half long at ten past nine, I'm sure you can imagine our disgust as we splashed our way past Broomhill Methodist Church, only a couple of minutes down the road and the same distance from the student village, to see its eight voting booths standing empty! Why the whole of Ranmoor Student Village was registered to vote in one polling station I really do not understand, and why they were so blatantly understaffed! The returning officer kept claiming that the polling station could only cope with so much capacity, yet they KNEW how many people were registered to vote there! And all this crap about students not having their polling cards... I didn't see a single person in that line without a card! Surely it was more to do with the disgusting organisation and THREE people organising paperwork!

As we sat dripping in the Chinese, the news signalled 10pm and the closing of polling stations, and I genuinely thought voters would still be going through the doors at Ranmoor until around midnight. I can't believe people were actuallly turned away! It's not like they'd rolled up at quarter to nine; a lot of people must have been there since half seven and wouldn't have been able to vote! Students, that is... Residents could have rolled up an hour later and still stood a chance. The whole thing was just an absolutely chaotic disgrace!

So now we wait to find out what's actually going to happen...