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!
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- http://joebangles.blog.co.uk/
- 2007-05-06 @ 01:04:40
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shaz_the_prole
- 2007-05-06 @ 01:11:39
yes trevor, many people did that, if they had only 1 X on the council ballot it would have been counted as if it were their number 1 but if they had made any other mark on the paper it would have been deemed spoiled. Here in Cunninghame North where the Minister for Enterprise Alan Wilson lost his seat there were only 48 votes in it so I think that perhaps the spoiled ballots may have had a effect one way or the other in the result, but I do think that most of the mistakes would have been made on the Council paper with the new Single transferrable vote system of PR. Most people are used to X next to who they want, so I dont imagine that many of the actual parliamentary papers would have been spoiled.
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Hi, I don't believe the figure of 100,000 spoilt papers actually means loss of votes to the candidate or the voter.
Stupidly I placed an "x" on the form that should have had the numeral written in, on going back to the official to explain he asked for both of my papers back and said that they would be treated as "spoilt" papers, then he gave me two new forms and I voted in the normal way.
I'm sure that many people made the same mistake and did the same as I did, accounting for many of the so-called spoilt papers.