Marvin Rees will have to face a “trigger ballot” in order to see if he will be automatically chosen as Labour’s Bristol mayoral candidate.
Mayoral elections are taking place in the city in May next year.
Both the Green Party and the Liberal Democrats have already selected and announced their candidates for the 2020 election.
Which has left people wondering why the current mayor has not been officially announced as a candidate for his party - with the election just over a year away.
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The answer is that the Labour Party has a somewhat complicated selection process.
It is not just the case that Mr Rees can just decide he is going to stand for a second term as the incumbent mayor of the city.
Instead -like other Labour mayors hoping to stand again - he will have to go through a trigger ballot, in which every branch of the local party votes to either re-adopt you as their candidate or go through a full selection process, in which other candidates can stand.
In Mr Rees’ case he will have to win the support of of more than 50 per cent of constituency parties and affiliates in Bristol.
This includes the 29 Labour Party branches in Bristol and all organisations and trade unions affiliated to the Bristol Labour Party.
London Labour mayor Sadiq Khan went through the exact same process last year - eventually securing the votes needed to avoid an open selection following the trigger ballot.
In Bristol all party members will have - or should soon - be receiving a letter from their branch or trade union secretary inviting them to vote in the trigger ballot.
Members will be asked to vote on whether they would like Marvin Rees to be automatically reselected, or whether they'd like a full selection process to take place.
It will be a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ question that could end with Mr Rees being automatically reselected if he gets more than half of the vote.
A number of branches have already voted in the city, but we won't know the full picture until the end of the month when all the votes are cast.
If Mr Rees loses the ballot it won’t necessarily mean that he would not be Labour’s candidate for mayor next year.
Instead it means there would be an open selection for the party’s Bristol mayoral candidate.
Some members prefer this option not because they don't want Marvin to be their candidate but because it means every party member will get one vote - rather than it being a branch vote.
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It could see other Labour candidates put themselves forward in the hopes of becoming the party's mayoral hopeful next year with members then asked to vote for the candidate they prefer.
Of course if he loses the trigger ballot Mr Rees may choose to not stand in the second vote automatically deselecting himself.
