This year's heady round of local council elections in England and Scotland will coincide with polls for the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly, making it the biggest single test of national public opinion and voting intentions this side of a full general election.
For the local elections, in particular, there will be some notable innovations, with the introduction of proportional representation for the 32 councils in Scotland and with 12 electoral pilots schemes at 12 councils in England.
The Electoral Commission has also overseen a number of changes designed to help encourage higher voter turnouts, but also to protect the integrity of postal votes to guard against the sort of malpractice which resulted in the 2005 trial into electoral fraud at Birmingham.
As ever, there will be a great deal of attention paid to polling turnouts – especially among young people – and the Department of Constitutional Affairs has been heartened by a recent drive to improve voter registration hailed by democracy minister, Bridget Prentice, as a ‘fantastic' success with almost half-a-million new voters signing on.
If you live in Gateshead and Sunderland, then you will be able to vote up to two weeks early, while in Bedford and Broxbourne, you will have to wait one week before the official polling day.
Elsewhere, Rushmoor will be testing the waters for Internet voting, while Sheffield, Shrewsbury and Atcham, South Bucks and Swindon will all be trialling a novel combination of Internet and telephone voting in the week leading up to polling day.
Breckland, Dover and Stratford upon Avon, together with Warwick DC, are to test the efficiency of electronic scanning machines to count the votes, and all the 12 pilot schemes are the latest attempts to assess the effectiveness of  modern alternatives to the traditional stubby pencil in drafty local school or church hall.
More than 10,000 council seats are up to grabs in the English local elections, with voters going to the polls in a mix of  312 metropolitan, unitary and district council areas together with contests for directly-elected mayors in Bedford, Mansfield and Middlesbrough.
All three of the main political parties have launched their formal local campaigns in England with the Conservatives, in particular, downplaying expectations of any major gains in the major northern cities, where so far, only the Liberal Democrats have made significant inroads into Labour traditional urban strongholds.
At present, the Conservatives control some 166 councils, with Labour on 55 and the Liberal Democrats on 34, and at the very least, the Tories are expected to consolidate their relatively-slender control of the Local Government Association.
The national media is expected to focus a great of its attention on how well more marginal parties such as the UK Independence Party or the British National Party perform, and to what extent they continue to scoop up protest votes against the mainstream political machines. UKIP has said it will treble its number of candidates to more than 1,000, and the BNP claims it will double its number of candidates to  750 compared with last year.
Arguably the most radical innovation in local elections will be north of the border, where the introduction of proportional representation has thrown open the political control of all 32 of Scotland's councils.
The elections will also see many experienced councillors standing down and accepting ‘golden farewells', in return for their years of service. But to some extent, the outcomes will depend on the balance struck by voters on issues such as council tax, schools and hospitals, between deciding who will manage their local affairs and who should be in control nationally.
For Tony Blair, this round of elections will be his last as prime minister, having arrived at Downing Street 10 years ago on a high tide of Labour local authority votes which has only slowly, but steadily diminished in recent years.
Whatever the final outcome, it will seem a long way from the heady days of May 1997 with its new super-ministry of the Department for the Environment, Transport and the Regions.
For David Cameron, the test is likely to be measured by how far he can move the Conservative vote out north from its southern heartlands. While his party made significant gains in London and the South East in last year's local elections – they gained just one new councillor in the North.
In England there will be some 10,500 council seats up for election in 312 local authorities on 3 May.
There will also be votes for directly-elected mayors in Bedford and Mansfield DCs at Middlesbrough Council.
Half of the elections will take place in just three regions – the eastern, southern and the south-western parts of the country. One-third of council seats in all 36 metropolitan boroughs will be contested.
In 25 unitary authorities, the whole council will go to the polls, while in another 20, only one-third of seats are up for election.
In 153 district councils, all the seats will be up for election, while at 78 district councils, just one-third of seats will be contested.
In Scotland voters will have two separate colour–coded ballot papers and will go to the polls to elect 1,222 councillors in 32 local councils, as well as Members of the Scottish Parliament.
For the first time, councillors will be elected using a form of proportional representation – the Single Transferable Vote (STV).
Each council is divided into multi-member wards containing either three or four councillors. Candidates will be listed on white ballot papers, and voters will be able to list them in order of preference and can vote for as many or as few as they wish.
Electors have two votes for the Scottish Parliament, which has 129 MSPs –  with 73 elected to single-member constituencies and 56 regional MSPs elected in eight multi-member regions.
Voters will use an Additional Members System (AMS) for the Scottish Parliament, which combines a first-past-the-post electoral system with an element of proportional representation.
Ballot papers are to be divided into peach for constituency members, and lilac for regional members, drawn from a list of political parties and individuals.
In Wales, voters will elect 60 members of the Welsh Assembly – 40 from constituency seats and 20 from regional lists, with four AMs elected by proportional representation for each of the five regions in Wales.