Local elections 2012: polling booth nerves, spoiled ballots and an intriguing pregnancy scandal at the count This morning I dropped in at an election count. I was there to support my father, who was standing as a Labour candidate for his local council, but I hadn't bargained on seeing lots of ballot papers beamed onto a screen so that adjudicators could work out if they were spoilt or not. There were unprintable four letter words scrawled across some, things along the lines of "none of you are worth a penny" on others, and then there were the ballot papers on which people had attempted to vote for four candidates, or in one case, all of them. Anyway, by far the most interesting was the paper on which someone had written "you made me pregnant, you bastard" next to a candidate's name. It's democracy of sorts, I suppose. As for whether the statement was true or not, it certainly raised a smile on the faces of the count staff, who had churned through thousands of ballot papers for hours and hours - someone relayed to me that they had seen a similar comment on a ballot paper in Westminster. It also raises the question of polling booth nerves. Do you, like me, start shaking before going into one? Do your palms get sweaty, do you worry you might hyperventilate? Last night I became concerned I would tick the box rather than put a cross through it - or worse, stick a cross next to the name of the BNP candidate, in a strange form of polling tourettes. I didn't, by the way. And no, I can't reveal the name of the candidate accused of impregnating a constituent, but it wasn't either of the big two. Or my father, for that matter.