Mayor of London

Guy Aitchison (London, OK): The Telegraph's Three Line Whip blog reports that the total number of "spoiled ballot papers" which included "41,032 rejected first choice votes and 412,054 rejected second choice votes" was "three times the size of Boris Johnson’s 140,000-vote majority". A "fiasco", fumes the Telegraph's David Hughes, a "democratic travesty". The Electoral Commission must take actions since "who knows what the result might have been if there had not been such a spectacular display of voter confusion."

We asked supporters of the Tories, Lib Dems, Labour and the Greens to give us a short, "democratic" case for their mayoral candidate in tomorrow's London election. This is what they came up with - presented, for want of a better system, in alphabetical order. Who makes the best case?

The case for Boris

Jonathan Bryant (Brighton & Hove, Direct Democracy)

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): There is an interesting James Forsyth post in the Speccy on the half-hearted and unenthusiatic endorsements of Livingstone from the left(ish) media. You could say the same for me. The ambiguous nature of Ken was always part of his originality. Back in the days of the GLC I argued that what made him different from the Militant Trotskyists in Liverpool was that he was open to feminists and demands for racial and sexual equality in a way that his sectarian colleagues were not (regarding such issues as bourgeois distractions). Indeed, Ken was much less tribal than the official Labour Party. It was this aspect of his politics that Jeremy Gilbert praises in his disco dancer endorsement (opens as pdf). But Ken never understood this or made it part of his calling card. Today he is running on his 'record' but not on any wider vision. His election letter to Londoners is feeble rather than exciting. It is odd. Forsyth compares the media support Ken has got from the Guardian group to the low-key endorsements of John Major by the Tory press in 1997, support for a losing cause. But Major was a disaster; the man who brought us the privatisation of the railways whilst Ken did the congestion charge.

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): Just watching the Question Time debate between the three main London mayor candidates. I came in late. Boris said Ken had comitted a "whopper" on the fares. But Ken accused Boris of changing his tune for his audience. I suspect Ken was right on one issue. Asked whether he supported a general amnesty for immigrants who are already here in contrast to his Party leader, Boris denied this. Emphasizing that his main concern was uncontrolled immigration he stated that he only supported giving legal status to the few who had worked here for years and who you couldn't send back to their country. Ken accused him of altering what he said on television compared to what he said when talking with other audiences. Boris denied this. But as you can see, when I blogged the event it certainly seemed to me that I heard Boris back the call of Strangers into Citizens to legalise all immigrants already working here, when he addressed the London Citizens event which I blogged. Both the Question Time sequence and the London Citizens one are on video so it shouldn't be too hard to compare them.

Jon Bright (London, OK): Any Londoners out there unsure of where to cast their vote in the upcoming elections might want to check out "Vote Match 08" - a new website launched by Unlock Democracy and the Dutch Instituut voor Publiek en Politiek. The tool poses a range of policy based questions, then asks you to select which areas are of most importance for you, before fixing you up with a politician to suit your needs. The candidates themselves have already answered the same set of questions, so you'll be getting someone who thinks like you on the issues you feel strongly about (hopefully). To my slight disappointment, I was paired off with Boris Johnson, who I am not exactly a massive fan of. But it's nice to know we're not so different after all. Who will you end up with?

Jon Bright (London, OK): The probability of Boris Johnson securing the conservative party nomination for Mayor of London is now so overwhelming that his primary campaign is becoming virtually indistinguishable from the election campaign proper. And he's beginning to stake out his battleground.

But transport - with a particular focus on his loathing for 'bendy buses' - feels like an unusual choice. As anyone who makes regular use of them will know, London's bus network is superb. Bendy buses, in combination with the Oyster card, have done away with the maddening, infuriating wait at each stop where the usual incompetents fiddle with their change or ask obscure questions about the destination. Their sheer frequency sometimes beggars belief - only at the dead of night in the most obscure backwater will you wait longer than half an hour. So what's his problem?