Polling closes in Glasgow North East By Election

UPDATE: 01:51hrs

Total votes cast: 20,628 (Turnout 33.02%)

Labour: 12,235 (59.3%); SNP: 4,120 (20.0%); Conservative: 1,075 (5.2%)

Deposits lost by all other parties: BNP: 1,013; Solidarity (Sheridan): 794; LibDems: 474; Greens: 332; Jury Team (Smeaton):258; SSP: 152; Others (54, 47, 32, 13)

UPDATE: 01:49hrs

Our predictions of order have been confirmed.

UPDATE: 01:46hrs

Candidates and agents have been called to one side.. announcement should be very soon now.

UPDATE: 01:40hrs

Counting has now largely finished.

We are projecting a win for Labour, SNP in second place. Third place we believe will be Conservatives but only marginally ahead of BNP and it is not clear if Conservatives have retained their deposit. BNP have lost their deposit and, we believe, fallen short of 1000 votes. The order thereafter is not completely clear but we think that it will be Tommy Sheridan ahead of LibDems and Greens with the rest following.

Announcement should come fairly soon we think..

UPDATE 22:30hrs 

Polling has closed in the Glasgow North East by election and the boxes are now being opened at the SECC.

 Early box counts suggest the BNP are likely to do well in some areas with some boxes having up to 5 out of 50 votes to the BNP, but this is by no means consistent across the constituency. It looks like it will be between Labour and SNP with every other party trailing and struggling to retain their deposits.

Importantly it's not clear how clean this election has been - we hear that, unusually, one person was actually caught for the electoral fraud crime of 'personation' (the person staffing the polling station happened to know the voter she was pretending to be). One of our Councillors spoke to two voters who had turned up at the polling station only to be told that their vote had been cast as a postal vote. We have heard there were some 3,600 postal votes - a number which might well tip the balance with such a low turnout during the day.

More updates later on.