Twenty four days and nights of campaigning, thousands of leaflets, door knocks, speeches, tricks, headlines and handshakes - finally the beautiful rosette of democracy blossoms and it is all down to the voters.

But on the hottest day of the year, in a by-election on which the future of the Prime Minister and Scotland are at stake, many of the electors in Glasgow East may just have shrugged their sunburnt shoulders and let the political caravan pass them by.

"Fat lot of difference the weather makes to voter turnout," complained one of the party activists outside St Mark's primary school on the border of Shettleston and Parkhead.

The local gang is called the Border but there were no last-minute territorial disputes among the rival parties as the political process took its course.

The turnout in the constituency in 2005, when it was a Labour fiefdom, was low for a General Election at 48%. Mid-afternoon indicators seemed to point to just over half that number of voters taking the opportunity to put their cross in the box.

Quiet, slow, steady, poor - these were the descriptions from voting officials at polling stations across the constituency.

As the afternoon sun beat down, party volunteers thrust leaflets into the hands of anyone coming within range who looked like they might intend to vote. There were bound to be a lot of red faces at the count in Tollcross leisure centre as activists held on outside polling stations hoping for a late flurry of evening votes.

Estimates of voter numbers varied from 9% at noon to around 29% of the 62,051 electorate by late afternoon.

Labour, which started the day with a frantic 5am mailshot through the doors, had hundreds of activists on the street to bring out its vote and avoid a defeat at the hands of the SNP, a result that would rock Gordon Brown's UK Government and Scotland to the political core.

The SNP's big yellow garage on Shettleston Road was going like a fair, the party is long practised in bringing in activists from all parts to help in a by-election. The official line was that the core vote had turned out for John Mason, but activists reported high levels of apathy on the doors they were sent to.

Former SNP MSP Kay Ullrich, canvassing outside Wellshot Road primary school, complained that many people in one ward had not received polling cards and were unsure about where to go.

Shettleston Labour councillor Tom McKeown, driving around the stations to collect data, said that the traditional Labour vote, mostly elderly, was holding up well.

Tommy Sheridan, saving himself a fortune in sunbed fees outside Eastbank Academy, felt his old colleague on Glasgow Council, John Mason, had just not achieved enough voter recognition to make the Labour castle crumble. But it was a day of what ifs and waiting, of ebbing rumour and a ritual tension that would only be released when the last ballot was counted.

One LibDem activist said around 29% of voters had hit the polling stations by late afternoon. The Conservatives felt total voter numbers at the polls had been "patchy" but were willing themselves to take third place from the Liberal Democrats and talked up their chances in a series of bets outside polling stations.

Money kept being wagered all afternoon across party lines on that outcome and on several other permutations, like how long the dry spell might last. On days like these no-one can make predictions and the result, like the weather, was out of the hands of politicians.