8.16pm: After a tumultuous 24 hours, it's time to wrap up. Here's an evening summary.

• Britain has rejected the alternative vote with a thumping majority. With the final results still coming in, the no camp were ahead by a margin of 69% to 31%. Nick Clegg described it as a "bitter blow". The news came at the end of a day of anguish for the Lib Dems that saw them lose around 700 seats in council elections in England. The results are likely to sour relations within the coalition to a certain extent. But the AV result also has important implications for the Lib Dems' relations with Labour too. Some Lib Dems blame the defeat on the fact that that large numbers of Labour MPs, activists and supporters came out against AV. Even though Ed Miliband backed AV, it is hard now to imagine a Labour/Lib Dem coalition backing electoral reform.

• Alex Salmond has signalled that he wants to represent the whole of Scottish society in his second term as Scotland's first minister. With 69 seats in the Scottish Parliament, the SNP will form the first one-party majority government since the parliament was established. But, in an appeal to non-SNP voters, Salmond said his party had "a majority of the seats, but not a monopoly on wisdom". David Cameron said that if the SNP tried to achieve independence, he would fight to keep the UK together "with very single fibre that I have".

• The Conservatives have been quietly celebrating modest gains in the English local elections. Although they were expected to lose seats and councils, by Friday night they had made a net gain of three councils and 81 council seats. According to the Tories, their share of the vote in the council elections was 38%, while Labour's was 37%. Labour gained 800 seats and 26 councils - a respectable result, but not one that suggests Ed Miliband has achieved a clear breakthrough. Miliband did, however, welcome the "fantastic" result Labour had in Wales, where it is just one seat short of a majority.

That's it from me. Time to get some sleep. Have a good weekend.

8.08pm: Henry McDonald has sent filed on the latest results from Northern Ireland.

The Democratic Unionist Party MP Gregory Campbell has just been elected to the Assembly from his East Londonderry constituency.

Campbell received 6139 first preference votes and exceeded the quota. The most interesting battle will be between the Ulster Unionist candidates and former UUP candidate David McClarty. He received over 3000 votes and may cost the UUP a seat. McClarty decided to run as an independent after he was de-selected having served in the last Assemby as the parliament's deputy speaker.

And former Northern Ireland sports minister Edwin Poots has just been elected to the Assembly in the Lagan Valley constituency.

Poots received 7329 first preference votes and exceeded quota as did his Ulster Unionist rival Basil McCrea who got 5771 votes in Lagan Valley.

7.58pm: The Tories now say they have won 50% of all council seats up for election.

7.54pm: Jack Straw has told the BBC that the result of the AV referendum will lead to the return of two-party politics. Paddy Ashdown said this was "pushing it a little" and that the 30-year emergence of multi-party politics in the UK would not be reversed in a single night.

7.46pm: Earlier I said it was time to read up on Lords reform. (See 7.04pm.) If you didn't believe me, do read the article that Tim Farron, the Lib Dem president, has written for Comment is free. He says that, despite defeat in the AV campaign, the Lib Dems will continue to be a reforming party and that the "most important" issue is now the Lords.

The UK is the last ancien régime in Europe: a country where we still have people deciding our laws who are doing so merely because they were born in to a certain family. A country where the upper house has important powers to revise legislation but its members are not democratically accountable. That is not right and many people recognise that it is wrong. And we will change that. No, I'm not suggesting that I will demand further concessions from our Conservative coalition partners on this issue as some have suggested the Liberal Democrats will now do. We're grownup people and not children who have a tantrum when they don't get something they strongly wanted. We accept we lost the argument on AV. I'm merely reminding my Conservative colleagues that our programme for government, the coalition agreement, states that "we will establish a committee to bring forward proposals for a wholly or mainly elected upper chamber on the basis of proportional representation". That committee will report soon and I expect Tory backbenchers to abide by the agreement we made – just like we respect that we lost the referendum.

7.40pm: It's official. The no camp have won.

I'm not at the count, so I don't know whether the anti-AV campaigners threw their hands in the air and shouted: "Yes." I'd love to think they did.

• The no camp have now officially won the AV referendum campaign. They have passed the 50% threshold. They've now got more than 9.8m votes.

7.33pm: According to the BBC, the no camp need to get more than 9.8m votes to clinch victory. They're almost there. Here are the latest figures, with results in from 342 out of the 440 areas.

Yes: 4,216,527 - 31.7%

No: 9,098,846 - 68.3%

7.31pm: Peter Bone, a Tory backbencher, has told the BBC that he thinks there is "very little chance of this coalition going five years".

7.26pm: Michael Gove, the education secretary, has told the BBC why it took him so long to decide to vote not to AV. Originally he was undecided, he said. But he has enjoyed being in coalition with the Liberal Democrats and he felt that, given their enthusiasm for electoral reform, he had to consider the merits of the idea "out of courtesy".

7.21pm: My colleague Simon Rogers has been mapping the AV results on his data blog. It's very handy. As a resident of a rare slice of pro-AV territory (Lambeth), I can find out who else lives in AV-land.

7.17pm: Here are the latest AV figures, with results from 323 areas. Only seven of them voted yes.

Yes:7 3,905,343 - 31.7%

No: 316 8,427,622 - 68.3%

7.13pm: Daniel Hannan, the Tory MEP, has written a colourful hatchet job on the yes camp on his Telegraph blog. Here's an extract.

In the current climate, victory was always likely to go to the side which most convincingly presented itself as anti-politician. On one level, "Yes" campaigners seemed to grasp this: their television broadcast featured voters shouting at MPs through megaphones. Yet their aperçu was smothered by their far stronger prejudice anyone who actually was anti-politician. If they had been cleverer, they would have allowed Nigel Farage to front their campaign. When he purports to be against a closed political Establishment, voters (including many of those who would never dream of voting UKIP) believe him. Instead, they relied largely on a group of right-on luvvies. Never mind the question of why we should take advice from actors who, after all, earn their living by feigning emotions they don't feel and reciting lines they didn't write. The idea that anyone would see Tony Robinson or Eddie Izzard as anything other than a paid-up member of the metropolitan elite was risible. The "Yes" campaign made no attempt to deploy any arguments, or any personnel, with appeal beyond a narrow slice of the soft Left – the one constituency whose support was guaranteed in any case. The liberal Left was, with pleasing karma, undone by its own narcissism. "Yes" campaigners seemed genuinely not to understand that Caroline Lucas, Ed Miliband and Benjamin Zephaniah do not, among them, cover the entire political spectrum.

7.09pm: The first result has come in in Northern Ireland. Henry McDonald has sent me this.

Sinn Fein was the first party to elect an Assembly member in Northern Ireland.

Conor Murphy, a former IRA prisoner and Transport Minister in the last power sharing government, topped the poll in Newry/Armagh - the first constituency to declare a result. Murphy received 9127 first preference votes and exceeded the quota.

The SDLP's Dominic Bradley and the deputy Ulster Unionist leader Danny Kennedy also exceeded the quota and were elected.

7.04pm: It's time to start reading up on Lords reform. The government is due to publish its plans for Lords reform later this month and, with AV off the table, Nick Clegg's best hopes of persuading people that he has achieved substantial constitutional reform depend on reforming the upper chamber. Paddy Ashdown told the BBC that he expected Labour to block the plans. But Peter Hain said that he was very confident that Labour would support Lords reform. All three main parties proposed it in their manifestos, he said.

6.59pm: Last year the yes camp were clearly ahead in the polls. And they were even ahead in March, on some measures. (At one stage polls produced quite different results, depending on how the question was phrased.) If you want to see how the polling has changed over the last year, look at the YouGov tracker figures (pdf).

6.55pm: The Electoral Commission website is back up, and the no camp have got more than 7m votes. Here are the latest figures.

Yes: 3,254,342 - 31.49%

No: 7,080,182 - 68.51%

6.51pm: In Northern Ireland the counting hasn't exactly been proceeding smoothly. Henry McDonald has sent me this.



Martin McGuinness and Peter Robinson have called for a rethink on the way the election results have been counted.

At quarter to seven on Friday night there were still no actual results from any of the 18 constituencies across Northern Ireland.

One of the most embarrassing problems facing electoral staff was in Fermanagh/South Tyrone where a number of ballot boxes had been filled with rain water. The ballot papers from the boxes had to be given the hair dryer treatment before being verified earlier today.

6.42pm: The BBC has had Paddy Ashdown and Peter Hain - two electoral reformers - in the same studio discussing the failure of the AV campaign. Ashdown suggested Labour was to blame.



There's a very clear message from this. You cannot trust Labour with reform.

Ashdown predicted that, when the the government tried to reform the Lords, there would be resistance from "the same coalition". Labour "backwoodsmen" would join up with Tory "backwoodsmen" to "stop reform of a chamber based on patronage".

Hain hit back. He said Nick Clegg's unpopularity was the main problem with the campaign.

6.36pm: The Tories have sent out a briefing putting their spin on the local election results. Here's an extract.



• Conservative Party estimates of vote share suggest Conservative victory in local elections and an improved performance on the 2010 General Election. With 38 per cent of council election votes counted, we calculate that our vote share is down 2 points on 2007 at 38per cent, Labour are up 11 points on 37 per cent, and the Lib Dems are down 7 points on 17 per cent. Last year, we won 36 per cent of the vote. • Governments have posted much lower vote shares in council elections and gone on to win majorities. In 2000, Labour won 30 per cent of the vote (against 38 per cent for the Conservatives), and went on to win a 167 majority at the General Election next year. Labour never won more than 33 per cent in local elections in the 2001 Parliament but still won a 66 seat majority in 2005 • Miliband did worse in his first electoral test than Blair and even Foot. In Blair's first local elections in 1995, Labour won 47 per cent of the vote. Even Michael Foot beat Miliband's 37 per cent, winning 41 per cent in 1981.

I haven't had anything similar from Labour or the Liberal Democrats. But if they would like to send me something, I will be happy to put it up.

6.32pm: Why did the yes camp lose? I've been tempted to post on this, but my colleague Tom Clark has got there first. He has has listed 10 reasons in a post for Comment is free.

6.30pm: Peter Hain, the shadow Welsh secretary and an enthusiast for electoral reform, has just said that the yes camp would have had a much better chance of winning if the referendum had been held on a different day.

6.29pm: Lambeth voted 55% yes, 45% no, according to the BBC.

6.28pm: My colleague Henry McDonald has sent me this from Northern Ireland.

DUP leader Peter Robinson acknowledged that the unionist vote had been split once again in the elections. Speaking at the East Belfast count being held in Newtonards where he is expected to top the poll Robinson said that the "unionist family need to have a conversation after this election." Robinson's expected victory has been a remarkable turn-around in fortunes for the First Minister. Last year he lost Westminster seat in the general election in a defeat blamed on the scandal surrounding his wife Iris and the revelations that she had secured a business loan for her teenage lover. As he entered the count in Newtonards the DUP faithful serenaded Robinson with a rendition of "He is a Jolly Good Fellow" - a clear sign that their leader is back.

6.27pm: The Electoral Commission's results page on its website has crashed.

6.22pm: I've just found out that I live in one of the AV capitals of the UK. I'm a Lambeth resident, and it's just one of two voting areas in the UK so far to have come out in favour of AV. The other is Glasgow Kelvin, according to the BBC's Chris Mason.

6.14pm: This is intriguing. My colleague Severin Carrell has been looking at the turnout figures for Scotland.

Despite the remarkable and historic scale of Alex Salmond's landslide victory in the Holyrood elections, there is one crucial piece of data to put it in some context. The overall turnout in Thursday's Scottish parliament election was 50%, which was 1.3% less than at the 2007 Holyrood election. This means that 1.9million Scots didn't bother to vote this year, and Salmond's victory was based on less than 25% of the Scottish electorate. For comparison, the turnout at the general election in 2010 in Scotland was 64%.

His opponents may argue these figures have some future bearing on Salmond's claims of a mandate for an independence referendum.

5.59pm: Here's a 6pm summary.

• The yes camp are heading of an overwhelming defeat in the referendum on the alternative vote. With 85 results in, the no camp have got with 70.55%, with 1,815,623 votes. Yes are on with 29.45%, with 757,810 votes. The BBC is predicted that no will win with 70%. The margin of victory is even bigger than the polls predicted. Turnout in Britain is 42%, which is higher than many expected.

• Alex Salmond has arrived in Edinburgh by helicopter and delivered a speech promising to "make the nation proud". He stressed the desire of the SNP to appeal to all sections of Scottish society. "When our movement began, it called itself the National Party of Scotland. And that is what it is again today – a party for all the people, a national party," he said. "Scotland has chosen to believe in itself and a shared capacity to build a society. The nation can be better, it wants to be better. I will do all I can as first minister to make it better. We have given ourselves the permission to be bold. We will govern fairly and wisely, with an eye to the future but a heart to forgive."

• Iain Gray has confirmed that he will stand down as Labour's leader in Scotland after his party's dire performance in the elections. Peter Mandelson said Labour had to become much more professional in Scotland. "Too often the Labour party in Scotland has exuded a sense of entitlement," he told the BBC.

5.57pm: Jeremy Browne, the Lib Dem foreign affairs minister, has just tried arguing on the BBC that it was not the Liberal Democrats' fault that they lost the AV referendum.

5.50pm: Danny Alexander has just conceded defeat in the AV referendum. "I accept that we're going to lose, quite handsomely," he said (according to James Kirkup on Twitter).

5.39pm: Carwyn Jones, Labour's leader in Wales, has just said that there will be a "Labour-led" government in Wales. As Simon Rogers' data blog map of the Welsh results says, Labour has 30 seats in the assembly - one short of the total it needs for a majority. Jones would not say whether he would seek a formal coalition agreement with another party.

5.35pm: The Electoral Commission has now got the turnout figures for the whole of Great Britain in the AV referendum. Some 18.6m votes have been cast, giving a provisional turnout of 41.8%.

5.34pm: There are 27 AV results in now. Here's the total.

Yes: 251,374 - 30.16%

No: 582,002 - 69.84%

5.19pm: Lord Mandelson has just been speaking to the BBC about the AV result. Here are the main points he made.

• Mandelson said there would be a "very decisive" vote against AV. "I think that's very disappointing. But I'm equally entirely unsurprised by it," he said.

• He said it was a mistake to hold the AV referendum now. The referendum coincided with political elections, and the "groundwork" had not been done. Voters did not understand the need for AV.

• He said the yes campaign was not strong enough to overcome the disadvantages it faced.

• He praised David Cameron for the way he campaigned against AV. Mandelson has already declared his membership of the Cameron fan club (see here, at 11.17am) and he did so again today. Cameron "exercised some very bold leadership", Mandelson said. Cameron "mobilised" his support effectively, even at the expense of coalition unity.

• He said Labour had been too complacent in Scotland. "Too often the Labour party in Scotland has exuded a sense of entitlement, if you like, a sort of "vote Labour because you know you want to" campaign. Labour had to reflect deeply on what went wrong, he said. The party had to campaign "much more professionally" in Scotland.

5.15pm: Here are the latest AV results. Six counts are in. This is the running total.



Yes: 37,338 - 30.14%

No: 86,540 - 69.86%

I'll be posting the running totals regularly, but if you can also find the up-to-the-minute figures on the Electoral Commission's website.



5.10pm: 5.10pm: Brian Taylor, BBC Scotland's political editor, has written a good post on his blog explaining why the SNP managed to do so well. One factor was Labour getting its strategy wrong.

It was perhaps summed up by the speech delivered by Ed Miliband to the Scottish Labour conference in Glasgow at the outset of the campaign. Yes, Mr Miliband talked about the SNP. But his prime focus was to assure his colleagues that they were about to take the first step (by winning in Scotland) towards victory for Labour (and, thus, E. Miliband) at the next UK general election. That was wrong on two counts. One, it talked about party prospects, not popular concerns. Two, it over-emphasised the subsidiary nature of the contest. Folk in Scotland understand devolution. They get the concept. But they believed that they were voting in a parliamentary election - a Scottish Parliamentary election. Not a rehearsal, not a dry run.

5.00pm: This is what the pollsters were predicting on AV.

YouGov (pdf). This is their figure based on those certain to vote.

Yes: 40%

No: 60%

ComRes

Yes: 34%

No: 66%



ICM

Yes: 32%

No: 68%

Angus Reid

Yes: 39%

No: 61%

4.54pm: The AV results are being counted by "voting area". In England and Northern Ireland these are local authority areas, and in Wales and Scotland they are parliamentary constituencies. There are 440 of them. Two have counted so far, and the votes are dividing: yes - 39%; no - 61%.

4.51pm: The first AV referendum results are in. And it looks as if the pollsters are not going to have too much to worry about.

Here they are, from the Isles of Scilly

Yes 288 (34.70%)

No 542 (65.30%)

No maj 254 (30.60%)

Electorate 1,737; Turnout 830 (47.78%)

You can see the results as they come in on the Electoral Commission's website.

4.44pm: Ray Mallon, the former police officer nicknamed Robocop for his tough stance on crime, has won a third term as mayor of Middlesbrough.

In other mayoral elections, Gordon Oliver, a Conservative, has been as the new mayor of Torbay. He beat the incumbent Nick Bye, an independent. And in Mansfield Tony Egginton, an independent, was re-elected as mayor.

4.40pm: They've been crunching the AV numbers at the BBC and think that the winning side will need 9.8m votes to win. Or to get "first past the post", as you could put it.

4.30pm: In Northern Ireland the election turnout appears to be lower than usual. My colleague Henry McDonald has sent me a note on this.

One Queen's University Belfast academic Dr Peter Shirlow has interpreted the lower than usual turn out in the Northern Ireland election as a sign that Ulster society is becoming more normal. In the past elections have been tribal contests where voters turned out in large numbers to keep the "other side" out. Thirty years ago more than 80% of the electorate in Fermanagh/South Tyrone turned out to vote in a Westminster by-election when IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands was elected as an MP even though he was dying in the Maze prison. Dr Shirlow may have a point here about these new turn out figures. Arguably the figure of around 55% indicates that Northern Ireland is becoming more like the rest of the UK and the Republic.

4.28pm: Here's some more on those AV turnout figures. No one was making any firm predictions about turnout in the AV referendum, but these figures are certainly higher than I was expecting. I thought the London turnout could well fall below 30%.

The turnout in London was higher than it was when Londoners voted in 1998 in a referendum on whether to have a mayor. The turnout then was 34.1%.

But the turnout in the North East was lower than the 47.7% turnout in 2004 in the referendum on whether to have North East Assembly.

4.26pm: Iain Gray has announced that he will resign as Labour's leader in Scotland in the autumn. Ed Miliband said that he respected Gray's decision and that he wanted to thank him for everything he had done.

4.02pm: For the last 18 hours officials have been counting the votes cast for the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly, the Northern Ireland Assembly and almost 300 English councils. But it's only now that they are starting to count the results in the referendum on the alternative vote. This was the only election open to everyone in the UK and potentially it could change the British constitution in an important way - but only if the pollsters have collectively made the most enormous mistake in British polling history. Assuming they haven't, the no team will win easily. But this is an important story too, possibly quashing hopes of electoral reform for a generation and producing long-term challenges for the Lib Dems.

Here is what the Electoral Commission has been saying about the turnout figures.

4 of the 12 regions have yet to provide figures, and the Commission will announce these shortly.

Counting Officers will begin counting the Yes and No votes from 4pm today.

The provisional turnout for each referendum region received to date is:

Region Turnout As percentage of registered voters

London 1.86 million 35.4 %

South West 1.80 million 44.6%

Eastern 1.84 million 43.1%

West Midlands 1.63 million 39.8%

Yorkshire and the Humber 1.53 million 39.9%

North West 2.05 million 39.1%

North East 0.76 million 38.7%

Scotland 1.98 million 50.7%

I'll be focusing on the AV results for the rest of the day, although I'll also be covering elections results as they continue to come in.

4.00pm: For all the election results and reaction to them up until 4pm on Friday, do read our earlier live blog.