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Reply to My Scottish Election Concerns From My MP

Posted on May 14, 2007
Filed Under Politics |

Back 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 Westminster, ultimatly, is responsible for the Scottish Election. I quote it here in full, before commenting.

Dear Ewan

Thanks for your email. You are right to be angry, and you may have seen my comments in the House of Commons when I raised the issue earlier this week - have a look (it’s half-way down the page)

I will also be raising the issue directly at a meeting with the Electoral Commission next week.

My view is that there shouldn’t be a rerun election, as there doesn’t seem to be a suggestion that the overall result would have been significantly different, and I don’t think that this additional uncertainty would be good for Scotland (even though all the reports I have had suggest it was actually Labour that lost most from the spoilt papers, so this is not a partisan position!).

However, I do think it is right for spoilt papers to be reexamined where there are serious questions about the way they were dealt with; I was staggered by the fact that in some areas it appears that even candidates were not allowed to look at them directly, which is unheard of in my 30 years experience as a candidate or an election agent.

Obviously if such reexaminations do throw up major questions about results in certain areas, I would imagine the defeated candidates themselves would demand a rerun, and that would be fair in my view.

I am making specific enquires about the situation in our own area - where there more than 1500 spoilt papers, even though that didn’t affect the result.

Mark Lazarowicz
www.marklazarowicz.org.uk

Congrats to Lazarowicz, he’s switched on enough to have a website, a Blogger site, and reply to the emails from FaxYourMP by email as well (so much easier to quote him here!). Thanks to They Work For You (and an RSS feed of all his speeches in Parliament) I already knew about his questions in the Commons. Along with pretty much every Labour MP gunnign for the Scottish Minister. I think that it’s a resigning matter to be honest but when have you known a New Labour MP to resign and take responsibility?

On the whole ‘there wouldn’t be a significantly different result,’ and the political meme that ‘all parties have been equally inhibited,’ I really must disagree. While it’s unlikely that the winning constituency seats would be different, Regional List votes (and the fifty six seats that go with them) will have taken the biggest hit. Most reports are that people were voting twice in the Regional List (instructions stated you have two votes, and then pointed down the ballot paper, but only to the Regional List), and these were discared. We have no way of knowing what thir first vote would be, and those votes could easily have seen parties such as Solidarity, who missed a Regional List seat in Glasgow by under 1% of the vote; the Green Party, who lost 7 seats via the Regional List; the Scottish Socialist Party, lost 6 seats; the Scottish Senior Citizens Party, lost one seat…

Not only have those parties lost seats, and Scotland looses the minor party voice in the chamber, they also probably affected the result. Given teh SNP made most of their gains on the list, the correct voter intentions could have seen them make less gains, and thus making Labour the largest party in Scotland.

So let’s not say that it’s minor, parties were inconvenienced, and the result is what we would have had before. We have no way of knowing. Lessons had better be learned, but this is an Election that, on the balance of the evidence, has not delivered to Holyrood the true representation of the people of Scotland.

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