Votes are being held in 19 wards and on seven parish councils across the borough.

Here’s everything you need to know.

The make-up of the council

There are 19 out of 57 Borough Council seats up for election this year – a third.

The council is run by the Conservatives, who have an eight-seat majority in the chamber. They have 32 councillors, Labour has 23, there is one independent and one seat vacant.

There are 28 seats not up for election, so whatever happens after the count on Friday, the Conservatives will have at least 20 councillors and Labour no fewer than 18.

The Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats each have a candidate in all 19 seats up for grabs.

The Green Party has 10 candidates, the Trades Union & Socialist Coalition have two candidates and there are two independents.

Whatever the results on Friday the new council will sit for a year until next May when a different set of 19 seats is up for election.

Swindon Borough Council has 20 wards; 18 with three members, one with two members and one ward with just one member. Each councillor serves a four-year term, with elections being held for a third of seats every year, with the fourth year ‘off’.

There will be elections next year, but not in 2025.

Voting

The polls on Thursday open at 7am and will remain open until 10pm.

If there is a queue to vote, and you are already in the queue before 10pm, you should still be allowed to vote.

If you vote in person you will need to show an accepted form of picture ID.

If you are going to cast a proxy vote on behalf of someone else, you should take ID with a picture of yourself, not the person on whose behalf you are voting.

If you have a postal vote, you must get it to the council by 10pm on Thursday. You can even take it sealed in its envelope to the polling station to hand it in, and you don’t need to show ID to hand your vote in.

Dogs at polling stations

Many people wonder if they can take their dogs into the polling station.

Guide and other support dogs are allowed as a matter of course. If a dog-owner wants to take a pet in they are best advised to check with election staff at the polling station, and if allowed, to keep their animal on a lead.

Results

As it has done for the last two election counts, Swindon Borough Council will begin verification and then counting on Friday morning.

Verification is the process of simply counting the number of votes cast in a polling station to ensure it matches the number of voters who have been counted coming in to vote.

Once that happens, the votes are counted, with votes for each candidate being stacked up in piles.

This is all done under the very watchful gaze of election monitors from all parties and independent candidates to ensure all is above board.

Once all the votes are counted and a result is known – and this can take time with the margins of success and failure in local elections often being in the single figures, so recounts are not uncommon – the candidates are called together by the returning officer, in Swindon’s case the council’s chief executive officer Susie Kemp.

She will then announce the results, listing the votes for each candidate.

And, after a weekend for all to recover, the work of the council continues for another year until the next election.

Parish council elections are being held in: Central Swindon South, Chiseldon, Haydon Wick, Highworth, Stratton St Margaret, West Swindon, Wroughton. Voting will be held in the same polling station as the borough council elections.