Increased turnout expected despite lack of elections

Voter turnout is expected to be up on the last set of elections in the Kirklees area, despite the region not going to the polls today.
The last poll Kirklees voters were invited to participate in were the Police and Crime Commissioners election back in November when less than 0% of eligible voters cast a ballot, rendering Mark Burns-Williamson as the lamest of lame ducks, with less than zero mandate to do whatever it is he's been elected to do.

Election officials across the area were bracing themselves for a comparative rush during today's polls. "Despite not opening any polling stations", one observer told us, "we're braced for a far busier day than we experienced last winter. We have had a programme in place to ensure that the comparative rush can be catered for and the terrible scenes of people actively not queueing at polling stations will not be repeated".

Much of the worry about the impending relative rush has been driven by the mainstream media who seem determined to describe today's elections as massively significant for the country, when in fact it is 37 largely rural English councils, a handful of unitary authorities, one mayoral election - Doncaster, where they get another go at unseating the thinly-veiled bigot they managed to elect on a previously unprecedented wave of apathy back in 2009 - and a by-election in South Shields prompted by David Miliband's massive dummy-spit.

"For this to be described as having any national significance", leading psephologist, Polly Votecaster, from the Dewsbury College of Electoral Science told us, "is extremely wide of the mark. All this is doing is allowing Conservative voters to vote either for Conservatives or UKIP based on a position they take on Europe that a local council is going to be able to do four-fifths of knacker-all about. But listen to national radio or newspapers and you'd think we were electing a new system of government or having a referendum over a return to the barter system. It's simply not the case".

Kirklees democracy fans have to wait until next spring to show quite how properly apathetic they are about local elections.