Dr Proles Social Sciences

The Scottish election was nail biting to say the least - each result ended in a neck and neck race between labour and the SNP for first place and the battle between the conservatives and the lib dems for 3rd place was just as fascinating. The end result was that the SNP won by 1 seat and this was reflected by the Conservatives beating the Lib Dems for 3rd place by just a single seat too.

I watched the results trickle in with great fascination. I live in the Cunninghame North constituency where Alan Wilson Labour Minister for Enterprise lost his seat by 48 votes, I had been speaking to people locally and was actually surprised that the result was so close as the majority I had spoken to had said they were voting SNP this time - I had therefore expected the gap between SNP and Labour to be much bigger than the 48 votes, but then we have the spoiled ballots to take into account so there is perhaps a chance that the gap was bigger.
The SNP made gains in North Ayrshire council too as did independents leaving no one party in over all control - some have welcomed this as a victory in what they have referred to as the 'smashing of the labour nepotism ring' in Irvine ( seat of the council), if such a ring existed or not can be debated however public perception is that such a ring did exist.

The Big story though is that of Alan Wilson losing his seat to Kenneth Gibson of the SNP - Labour have now suggested that Mr Wilson will challenge this result in the courts - I think if he does and it forces a bi-election here - Mr Wilson may well be in for a shock, such a case may well be interpreted locally as sour grapes at losing his job - this ofcourse means that Mr Wilsons staff in the Kilbirnie office will also be losing their jobs - If I am correct that means that at least one of Mr Wilsons relatives. If Mr Wilson takes this case to court I am wondering what he can expect to achieve - another election across Scotland? This was not the only constituency that had a large number of spoiled ballots - they all did. Some very unexpected results were obtained such as Tommy Sheridan losing his seat - could it be the case that all of Tommys votes needed for a seat were in that number of spoiled ballots and lost postal votes? Mr Wilson could well be setting up a domino effect across Scotland with this challenge - its not over yet for anyone by a long shot. What is apparent is that the SNP have won the popular vote right across the country in both parliament and the councils and we can summise that in those spoiled papers there will be a very simillar reflection of the ballots which were actually counted - if this is the case Mr Wilson will achieve nothing but a waste of tax payers money - can he not just bow out gracefully like Tommy Sheridan and say 'theres always next time'.

Our parliamentary elections here in Scotland have become headline news, as has my local constituency in particular.
On Thursday we went to the Polls to vote for our Constituency MSP, our regional MSP and our councillor. The problems began at the polling stations as people failed to comprehend the system for voting. The Parliament has a system of first past the post for the constituency MSP, a system of PR known as the additional members list system for the regional MSP's and a brand new system of the Single Transferable vote for the council elections. On the Parliamentary ballot sheet 2 X's were required one in each of the two sections and on the council ballot , 1,2,3,4 were to be used to indicate preference. There had been objections to both the parliamentary and the council elections being held on the same day but the decision was taken to run them. The result was that around 100,000 papers were deemed 'spoiled' and not counted, this coupled with 'missing' postal ballots has led to a large number of people who bothered to vote being disenfranchised. An appalling state of affairs. The problems didnt end there however. At this election it was also decided to use a new electionic system to count the votes - a sort of machine which scans the ballot papers and counts the votes - part of the reason given for this was that holding both the parliamentary and the council elections on the same day would mean it would take much longer to get the results counted. In some areas these machines failed and as a result some of the counts were halted. Add to all this fog halting the flights of helicopters delivering ballot boxes from the Islands and also the boat bringing the ballots from Arran to the mainland breaking down in the Clyde and you have what amounted to an electoral disaster. A member of the public also managed to cause some chaos in Edinburgh when he entered a polling station and proceeded to smash ballot boxes and tear up completed ballot papers - leaving staff to spend hour upon hour attempting to fix the ballot papers with sellotape!