W ITHOUT A BALLOT paper being marked, residents from Doddington and Wimblington, two villages in north Cambridgeshire, have already elected a pair of councillors. While candidates across England prepare for local elections on May 2nd, the two Conservatives faced no opposition for the seats and so were granted them without contest a month ago. They were by no means alone: 12 of the 39 seats in Fenland, the district council, were doled out this way due to a paucity of wannabe councillors.

Fenland is only the most egregious example of local democracy without the demos. Across England, 148 councillors—137 of them Tories—have already been elected without a fight, according to the Electoral Reform Society, which campaigns for fairer votes in Britain. Another 152 seats will be guaranteed to a particular party because there are too few candidates in a single ward (if, for example, five candidates from two parties battle for three seats).

The problem is finding enough candidates. In these local elections, 8,374 seats on 248 councils in England are up for grabs. Rounding up that many people willing to spend their evenings hearing complaints about bins, dog poo and broken playgrounds is hard. Still, the Conservatives are fielding candidates in 96% of seats—even in councils such as Knowsley, on the outskirts of Liverpool, where they are sure to get walloped. Labour, meanwhile, can only muster candidates in three-quarters of contests, despite its half-a-million members. The Liberal Democrats, who have a well-organised activist base, have fielded candidates for just over half the vacancies.

In those seats that are actually contested, the Conservatives are likely to have a bad night. The party is expected to lose between 500 and 1,000 of the 4,628 seats it holds, though it hopes to make some inroads in places such as Mansfield, a Leave-voting Midlands town which elected a Tory MP for the first time in 2017. Labour hopes to solidify recent gains in places including Trafford, a wealthy suburb of Manchester that voted Remain in the referendum and was the Tories’ flagship northern council until 2018, when the party lost control. But both parties are unloved, points out Robert Hayward, a Conservative peer and pollster. Tory weakness may not translate directly into Labour gains.

Instead, it is the Liberal Democrats who are the most optimistic. Councils that contain large numbers of Conservative Remain-voters are often overlooked by politicos, notes Mark Pack, a Lib Dem activist. Such voters are abundant in cities such as Chelmsford, which voted only narrowly to leave the EU in 2016. Although the Lib Dems face new competition on the national stage from Change UK , a new centrist party formed by disaffected Conservative and Labour MP s, they have a clear run in the local elections, where the new party is not fielding any candidates.