Yesterday’s Scottish Election Was A Disgrace – Disenfranchisment All Round
Quite simply, the election process in Scotland yesterday was a disgrace. I’m sitting here just after 9am on Friday morning, seven of the counts have been suspended, over 100,000 voters have not been able to make their intentions clear, and while it appears that the cause of this is arrogance and incompetence rather than malevolent intentions, it is still one hundred percent unacceptable.
Spoilt papers over previous years have always bounced around the 200-300 mark. To have this jump up to over 1000 in most constituencies, and touching 2000 in some cases (an increase by an order of magnitude). The turnout appears to be in the region of two million, so that means more than five percent of the vote is being ignored.
(BBC Guide to the ballot paper)
The only benefit we have is that we still have all the paper ballots, and an audit trail (The electronic systems were purely for the count – but seemingly they have problems ‘tabulating’ the results). At the very least, the results called last night should be nullified. Without confidence in the election result, democracy is at risk. At the very least there must be a full manual recount by hand over every constituency so that there can be no doubt in the tabulated results and voter intentions.
In my mind if this shows a large increase in spoiled papers due to confusion in the system (say more than a tripling in ’spoils,’ roughly 900 papers) then politicians must put the country first and take us back to the polls with a clearly explained system and no distractions. We managed this in the elections in 2003 and 1999, let us do so again and be an example to the world, rather than a laughing stock.
Scotland deserves a re-run of the Holyrood Election at the earliest opportunity.
Update at 10.30: If our politicians have the moral courage, all they need to do is not vote for a First Minister. If that post is not filled within 28 days of the election, then by law the country returns to the polls.
Update at 11:30: To illustrate the fun, Dunfermline West’s result was on a majority of 67 votes. There were close to 700 ‘rejected’ papers.
Update at 14:10: It’s clear there are two issues at play here. The first is the failure of the Electronic Counting System to ‘tabulate through a blockage at the end of the process’ (ie have each machine pass back a few varibales to a summing function). The second is adding the local election vote, and the design of the ballot papers. Eitehr of these issues on their own would lead to a serious probelm for the Scottish Executive who runs the ballot (from Westminster, btw). Together they are an almight cock-up.
Douglas Alexander, the Minister in charge, should seriously consider if the disenfranchment of almost 5% of the voting electorate is a resigning issue. I believe it is.
May 4, 2007; Politics;
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8 Responses to “Yesterday’s Scottish Election Was A Disgrace – Disenfranchisment All Round”
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Yep, it’s made us a laughing stock. I doubt a recount would change much – as I understand it, if the electronic machines didn’t understand a ballot paper it was passed to a human. So every rejected paper was rejected manually.
The problem was, of course, mixing the elections and systems and confusing everyone. Somebody’s head should roll for that decision.
I don’t know. I didn’ find it hard to vote. We had to mark two Xs on one sheet and then a few numbers on another. Not exactly rocket science.
If 100,000 people couldn’t be bothered to read what they were supposed to do, that’s their fault, not democracy’s.
I fully agree with you that it’s a bad situation, but if people value playing their part in a democratic process, the least they can do is learn how a voting procedure works and take personal responsibilty for any mistakes they make.
A few people I know were on Polling Clerk duties, and it would be fair to say that it was a mess, people were confused by the syste,. Add in the fact the ballot paper said “you have two votes,” and then an arrow down to the regional list; people have been voting and folding papers for fifty or sixty years; the human reluctance to admit that you don’t understand something and you have chaos.
Something is wrong somewhere. A full hand count will let the Presiding Officers determine if it was confusion or genuoine pictures of kittens on the ballot paper. That gives a clear indication why and we can go forward from there.
Didn’t anyone bother to test run the voting papers with a cross section of people? Having looked at that BBC link, whilst a lot of people could probably work out what to do, I’m sure that there were a good number of people who having been used to one system before would have had trouble with the change. I guess we have to wait and see what the investigation concludes.
Anyway, at least you had a chance to make your vote, even if it was hit by problems. Thanks to the switch to a unitary authority around here that elects in thirds we now only get an election in our village once every three years.
[...] Politics. trackback Around the scottish blogosphere, everyone’s (here, here, here, here) talking of what disgrace this election has been: shambles is the buzz word. And, indeed, it has [...]
It’s been a total disaster. I have a postal vote and was disenfranchised by the voting papers not arriving until the weekend, this was after I had left home and too late for me to apply for a proxy vote. There will be lots of travelling workers like me, who were messed up, to add to the counting fiasco
[...] (My previous thoughts on the elections) [...]
[...] to the Scottish Election Mayhem. I’ve had a reply to my previous post (see here) which I forwarded to Mark Lazarowicz, my local MP at Westminster (and the Scottish Office at [...]