Deeside voters go to the EU referendum polls today

Polling stations in Flintshire are now open.
An unprecedented number of voters are expected at the counties ballot boxes today as the country decides whether to remain the European Union or to exit, predictions suggest a turn out of around 70%

Flintshire County Council officials revealed, as of Wednesday morning, a massive 17,892 postal votes have been received so far at County Hall equalling around 15% of the total Flintshire electorate.

In May just 35% of Flintshire voters bothered to vote in the Welsh Assembly election though last years general election saw 67% of the Flintshire electorate turn out.

As a contrast, in the 1997 Wales Devolution election 41% of people in Flintshire cast a vote, as a more extreme benchmark, 84.59% of Scots voted in their 2014 Referendum.

A record number of people are eligible to vote in Thursdays EU referendum, after the biggest ever voter registration drive helped hundreds of thousands get their names on the electoral roll.

Provisional figures released by the elections watchdog, the Electoral Commission, show 46.5m people signed up to vote in the referendum – 150,000 more than could have turned out at last year’s general election.

More than two million people joined the electoral roll alone between December and June, said Electoral Commission.

There are 2,270743 people registered to vote in Wales up 4.7% since December with 115,900 registered to vote in Flintshire.

Polling Stations

One hundred Polling Station (listed here – pdf) will open across Flintshire and close at 10pm, like a general or local election, you will need to go to your designated polling station, which will be printed on your poll card – you do not need to take your poll card to vote.

The most popular times for visiting polling stations are late morning and after work.

Excitement 😉

The first bit of ‘excitement’ will be just moments after 10pm when the first ballot boxes from Flintshire’s 100 polling stations arrive at Coleg Cambria in Connah’s Quay.

Ballot boxes will then be emptied, papers will be verified and sorted.

Turnout figures including spoiled ballots and postal votes will be announced by the Counting Officer Colin Everett at around 1am.

Its expected the majority of the 382 counting venues will announce turnout figures between 12am and 3am.

The votes will then be counted by hand across the 382 count centres, each will announce totals for REMAIN and LEAVE.

The majority of counting areas are expected to declare between around 1am and 3am on Friday morning.

The last declaration is expected around 6am, Flintshire is aiming for a 3.30am declaration.

That’s not the end of proceedings for Flintshire, Council Chief Executive and Regional Counting Officer Colin Everett has been given the honour of overseeing and collating the count results from all 22 count venues across Wales.

These will then be fed through by Mr Everett to Manchester Town Hall where the main UK result will hopefully be announced sometime around 7am or 8am.

Updates throughout the day here /deeside.com