Election runners at the ready

Candidates have just four days to get their application in. In the process they will commit four years and eight months of their lives in service of their island. They will become public property.

The pressure is high from the start. There is just a month between nominations closing on Friday and the super polling stations opening.

In that time, scores of candidates will be trying to meet a million demands. For new ones, those who will make a success of their campaign, there will not be a minute they can call their own.

Many will already have done the preparatory work. Their manifestos will be written, pictures taken and, if they are going down that route, website created.

Those who are ill-prepared for tomorrow’s starter pistol will find the race is already under way and they are lagging badly.

As ever, those at the front include existing States members. They have been in the public eye for more than four years, their names should leap out from the list of 100 or so on the ballot sheet.

Not all of that is a benefit. We know how deputies voted and which ones came across as weak and fallible or bombastic and unreliable.

That aside, for all the freshness of this island-wide vote there is a distinct advantage to experience. Deputies standing again should have the tools to use social and traditional media and get their name out there.

Presenting a slick three-minute candidate video interview, for example, is about much more than confidence. It means pausing at the right time, not gabbling, not wearing patterned clothes, avoiding a spiel of numbers and facts devoid of charisma.

It is not easy.

Much has been made of the open nature of this election. Anyone over 18 can stand, provided they have lived here for two years and have no serious criminal convictions.

There is little training and much expectation.

Yet the election process itself is a filter. Those who have not fully committed, who cannot keep up the pace and are disorganised or shrinking violets will not last the course.