Comments on: Yesterday’s Scottish Election Was A Disgrace – Disenfranchisment All Round

By: The All New Ewan’s Musings » Blog Archive » Reply to My Scottish Election Concerns From My MP

Mon, 14 May 2007 19:48:34 +0000

[...] 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 [...]

By: The All New Ewan’s Musings » Blog Archive » Scottish Nationals Win The Flawed Scottish Election

Fri, 04 May 2007 21:24:42 +0000

[...] (My previous thoughts on the elections) [...]

By: Murdoch

Murdoch — Fri, 04 May 2007 21:08:59 +0000

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

By: scottish elections: old people got no reason to live « an insatiable yucca

scottish elections: old people got no reason to live « an insatiable yucca — Fri, 04 May 2007 19:38:06 +0000

[...] 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 [...]

By: Richard

Richard — Fri, 04 May 2007 11:23:56 +0000

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.

By: Ewan

Ewan — Fri, 04 May 2007 10:16:59 +0000

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.

By: Rob

Rob — Fri, 04 May 2007 10:02:39 +0000

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.

By: Trevor Mendham

Trevor Mendham — Fri, 04 May 2007 10:00:49 +0000

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.