Wrexham & Clwyd South Welsh Assembly Candidates Announced

At 4:15pm this afternoon the formal candidate lists for the Wrexham and Clwyd South constituencies were released for the forthcoming Welsh Assembly elections.

WREXHAM has six candidates:

• Andrew Mark Atkinson, Welsh Conservative Party Candidate
• Jeanette Stefani Bassford-Barton, U K Independence Party (UKIP)
• Beryl Blackmore, Welsh Liberal Democrats
• Alan Butterworth, Wales Green Party
• Lesley Griffiths, Welsh Labour
• Carrie Harper, Plaid Cymru

The full PDF of the notice of poll can be found here.

CLWYD SOUTH also has six candidates:

• Mabon ap Gwynfor, Plaid Cymru
• Simon Robert Maurice Baynes, Welsh Conservative Party Candidate
• Mandy Jane Jones, U K Independence Party (UKIP)
• Duncan Rees, Wales Green Party
• Aled Roberts, Welsh Liberal Democrats
• Ken Skates, Welsh Labour

The full PDF of the notice of poll can be found here.

The Welsh Assembly election will give you two chances to vote, one for a candidate in your constituency – so your favourite candidate in Wrexham or Clwyd South, or for those readers further afield (aside from England!) your local candidate.

You will also get a party vote or for independent candidates, which can be different from your local candidate vote, as that will be used to elect people from the so called ‘regional list’.

The candidate vote is local and is a traditional first past the post system, so whoever gets the most votes wins.

The regional vote is more complex as the aim is to make a proportional outcome to the vote. AboutMyVote.org.uk explains this with clarity:

“There are also five regions, each electing four regional AMs. There are 20 regional seats in total, which are awarded using a quota system. The quota is the total number of regional votes received by a party or independent candidate divided by the number of constituency seats already gained in that region +1.

“So, for a party with no constituency seats the number of votes received is divided by one. If the party has secured one constituency seat in that region then its number of votes is divided by two, if it has two seats in that region it is divided by three, and so on.

“This means that the more constituency seats a political party has won, the harder it is to gain any additional seats through the regional list system, so the overall allocation of seats is more proportional to the number of votes received.

The regional seats each political party win are filled by the candidates in the order they appear on the regional ballot paper – this order is decided by the political party. An independent candidate is treated as though he or she were a party with only one name on its list.”

The deadline to register to vote is Monday, 18 April 2016
Deadline to apply for a postal vote is 5pm Tuesday, 19 April 2016
Deadline to apply for a proxy vote is 5pm Tuesday, 26 April 2016

Wrexham.com encourages everyone to register to vote, and to check that the relevant information is held for you – you can do this online via https://www.gov.uk/register-to-vote