"I DIDN’T even realise it was today.” The man passing the polling station at Bournemouth’s Town Hall is not the only one, if the level of activity there is anything to go by.

Some people have called this Super Thursday – with seats contested on local councils, the Scottish parliament and the Welsh and Northern Irish assemblies, as well as the first national referendum since 1975.

But the occasion has left many people unmoved.

“Politics doesn’t interest me,” adds town centre resident Andrew Newans after realising there is an election on.

“They don’t listen to the normal person. If you haven’t got any money or business or anything, they think your vote doesn’t count.”

Most of the people at the Town Hall are there to visit the customer care reception rather than to cast a ballot.

“Do you know those forms you get sent out and you have to fill them in or you’re in trouble?” says another man.

“I didn’t even get one of those. I wouldn’t even know where to start.”

Jacqueline Letchford has already voted at Moordown in the council elections and in the referendum on the Alternative Vote system. She was against a change in the system. “It’s just me being old-fashioned,” she says.

At St Augustin’s Church Hall near Cemetery Junction, there’s an appropriately reverential hush. In fact, there is no activity at all while I’m there at lunchtime – other than the playgroup children enjoying a spell in the sunshine.

Another church hall, St James’s in Boscombe, sees at least a trickle of voters.

One of them, Jonathan Peterson, says he always makes a point of voting.

He has voted for a change to the AV system, arguing that it would not be too different from the process that works “fine” for the assembly in his native Wales.

But he’d rather not have more coalition governments like this one. “I wasn’t going to vote for AV because of the election results, because I didn’t think the Liberals would side with the Tories. If that’s what’s going to result from that sort of thing, I’m against it,” he adds.

Even in this hotly-contested council seat, it looks as though the majority of voters will exercise their right to abstain.

A woman outside the church asks me: “Excuse me – do you have to vote?”

From the evidence around us, it’s a good job you don’t.