Decisions, decisions...

For the first time in my voting career, it was nigh-on impossible for me to decide on a candidate. The campaign in Scotland was very lacklustre with all the parties climbing over each other to promise things they almost certainly won't be able to pay for in a couple of months' time, like free university tuition. We shall see...

Anyway for those of you in England, who don't have any form of proportional representation in Parliament, here's what we're presented with. (Not in focus because I didn't want the muscle-bound election administrators to wrestle me to the floor and throw me out if they saw me taking a picture.)

On the left, you have the regular choice for constituency MP - in this case four parties, Labour, Lib Dem, SNP and Tory. In the middle, you have the AV question. And on the right, the seemingly endless supply of 'list' candidates for the region. These are the beneficiaries of PR as the region's votes are tallied and the list candidates picked in proportion to that tally. Something like that. The Tories, who have no MPs in Scotland but some support spread across constituencies, do well out of this system. 56 out of 129 MSPs are chosen from the list, so that's quite a big proportion.

In the list system, you vote for the party and not the person, as the party decides on the hierarchy of the list. I'm not sure if they even have to state before the election who is on the list. The exceptions are the independent candidates, who put themselves forward as list MPs so you know exactly who you're getting. It does mean, of course, that the bigger parties can shoe-horn their favourites into Parliament without them having to run the gauntlet of constituency activists, which is not necessarily a good thing. And presumably they can be shoved out just as easily by the party apparatchiks at the end of the term.

So there you have it. I'm not going to tell you how I voted. I'm not even sure I can remember. I actually decided at the last minute. A dire situation. It'll be interesting to see the results in this time of apathy.