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Election overshadowed by spoilt votes |
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Friday, 04 May 2007 |
The Scottish Parliament and council elections yesterday were marred by
unprecedented amounts of spoilt ballot papers, particularly in Glasgow
constituencies.
Almost ten percent of votes cast in the Scottish Parliament elections
were invalid as the ballot papers had not been completed correctly.
The Electoral Commission said that it would conduct a review into what had happened.
"The Electoral Commission… will be undertaking a full, independent
review of the elections in Scotland. In particular, it will be focusing
on the reasons for the high number of rejected ballots; the electronic
counting process; and the arrangements for postal voting.”
The Electoral Reform Society described the situation as shocking and called for action.
Chief executive Ken Ritchie said: “When the system was first used in
1999 the number of spoilt ballots was less than one per cent. We need
to understand what has gone so wrong as to increase this number more
than tenfold.”
He said that electronic vote counting was not to blame. “While the
counting equipment has experienced teething problems in some areas, it
is not the equipment that has caused people to make mistakes in the
completion of their ballot papers.”
“Although many local government elections are still being counted, it
appears that with the new Single Transferable Vote system the level of
spoilt papers is very much lower, showing that Scottish voters are
quite capable of using different voting systems.
Confusion might have arisen from asking voters to complete so many different votes at once, Ritchie said.
“It is possible that holding two elections with very different voting
systems on the same day was a mistake. Holding future elections on
different days is an option that must be considered.”
Scottish Conservative leader Annabel Goldie said that her party had forecast problems.
“As we predicted, the numbers of spoilt vote has dramatically increased
as voters face two voting systems with three votes. In some seats the
number of spoilt ballots has increased ten fold and on occasion is
greater than that of the majority of the winning candidate.
“When taken in conjunction with the level of turnout it brings into
question the whole democracy of the Scottish Parliament. It is quite
simply unacceptable that tens of thousands of voters have effectively
been disenfranchised.
Goldie said that the Tories were committed to de-coupling the local
elections from those for the Scottish Parliament. "We have given Labour
and the Lib Dems many chances to introduce this. Firstly, they turned
down our amendments during the passage of the Local Governance
(Scotland) Act 2004. Secondly, we introduced a Member’s Bill.
“Our consultation on the Bill received support from 71 per cent of respondents.
“However our Bill did not achieve the Labour and the Lib-Dem Pact’s
support and therefore did not complete the legislative hurdles in time
but we will be examining the number of spoilt papers closely and may
re-submit the Bill when we return to the Parliament.”
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Last Updated ( Friday, 04 May 2007 )
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