Hustings for one

Last weekend I attended the weirdest Hustings.

You see about three months ago I agreed to act as a returning officer in the selection of candidates to fight the forthcoming local council elections.

Now in my experience us activist usually spend our time trying to find just one person for a vacant seat in the council elections and I’m sure like a number of you, have in the past, actually spent a “fun” evening before the close of nominations trying to fill that last spot by calling on every member in that ward and begging them to be a candidate.

But hey this is Cornwall and those days have long since past and so like an ever increasing number of places we actually have to select from a strong list which in this case, includes leading members in the council. So as you can imagine it was a tough election.

The turnout was incredible, over 90%. In fact on the election day, there was just a handful left to vote, and two of them were candidates!

So I wasn’t exactly expecting a pile of people.

Anyway ,I arrived early, set out a few chairs and briefed the candidates. Then we waited for someone to turn up.

With just a few minutes to go we had exactly one person he sat in the middle of the room waiting for the Hustings to start.

I checked the corridor looking for any lost souls but there was no one.
The voter said that he felt bad about being the only one and did we want to go ahead with the Hustings? But I explained that he came today to hear a Hustings and was about to base his vote on that, the Hustings had been open to every member and he had the right to hear the candidates.

So I asked them to begin ………..

Each candidate duly came in gave their speech, some stood and read their prepared statement out others sat down and just chatted and answering questions.

Soon it was over and time for him to vote, there was a short silence and everyone in the room kept a discreet distance from him whilst he marked his ballot paper and then it was over.
Democracy in action!

The count on the other hand took somewhat longer, using a system of Single transferable votes we slowly worked out which four candidates would be selected and in which order.

With no fancy computer programme to help there was much scratching of heads and over worked calculators.

Did the members vote make a difference? Well I don’t know, but I like to think it did.

One thing for sure, with over 90% voting we certainly heard what the members thought and that makes me proud to be a Lib Dem.