Leeds Local Election 2018: Who will you vote for? Every candidate listed for every area

Who gets your vote? Below are ALL the candidates standing in every Leeds ward.

Leeds City Council’s elections team started preparing in January for today’s big ballot.

But after the notice of election was published at the end of March, and candidate lists were finalised, the 12-strong core team stepped it up several gears.

The dedicated dozen has been working flat out including evenings and weekends for the last few weeks to make sure everything is ready for today.

But it’s not just Leeds’s core election team who are going to be hard at work throughout the day today and overnight at the election count at Leeds’s first direct arena.

At church and community halls across the city, 1,200 volunteers will be manning 356 ballot boxes across 346 polling stations.

Once the polls close at 10pm, 12 ballot box collection vans will be ferrying the city’s votes back to the arena for counting. However over half of presiding officers will bring the ballot boxes directly to the count venue themselves.

Once the boxes arrive at the arena, 400 counting staff will start the mammoth task of sifting through a mountain of ballot papers.

Susanna Benton, Leeds City Council’s Electoral Services Manager, is expecting to process 250,000 individual ballot papers tonight.

A veteran at dealing with the inevitable election day chaos, she has been working with the team for 22 years and heading it for seven.

She explains: “On election day, my team start at 6am and they will work right through until the count finishes, approximately 6am the following day.

“I have a great team who love the buzz of election day and the count after all the work they’ve put in, even though it’s such a long day.”

She also paid tribute to the army of volunteers helping the vote go smoothly.

“People come back year after year,” she said.

Despite the mountain of ballot papers coming her way tonight, Susanna doesn’t mind, and she and her team just want everyone to get out there and exert their democratic right.

“These elections are different because electors have the chance to vote for three candidates following the recent boundary changes,” she said.

“Local elections are important - and I encourage everyone to vote today.”