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Something that has puzzled me since it became apparent that rejected ballots were going to be one of the major stories from the recent election, was the lack of solid examples of what form the rejected ballots were taking.

As a result, we had politicians weighing in with broad statements. Whilst they or there representatives were, I’d imagine, present at the count, I’m grateful for Pat the Chooks who was an observer during the voting process, and provides some welcome detail:

During the count, the reason for this high rate became obvious: the majority of rejected parliamentary papers had two votes in the left-hand, the regional, column and no vote in the right-hand, the constituency, column. Candidates and agents were drawing the conclusion that voters were being misled by the instruction at the head of the sheet of paper, which read, “You have 2 votes …”.

Also many blamed the concurrent STV system, but Pat notes that the electorate seemed ok with that. Indeed, spoilt ballots on the STV system were much smaller. In my ward of Pollokshields, part of the Glasgow council election 149 out of 9567 – that’s 1.6% were rejected, much closer to ‘normal’.

It’s a shame that the sample ballot the press are seemingly obliged to show seems so clear and, well, concise. Here in Glasgow the regional ballot was huge, and the print quality wasn’t especially crisp. I’m also decidedly unimpressed with party names being abused (eg. “Alex Salmond for 1st Minister – SNP” to get them at the top of the list (More on this from Doctor Vee)).

Others have noted that the comment “you have TWO votes”, on one piece of paper was particular vague. However, it comes down to educating the voter ahead if time what the difference is between constituency and regional votes.

It’s Pat’s conclusion that “the problem with the process is not the electorate, as some have asserted, nor the voting paper, but the failure properly to inform and educate the electorate how MSPs are elected and why the regional vote matters.“. On the whole I agree: Educating people about the mechanics of the democratic system has to be for the better.

What’s clear is STV worked, and so did the counting systems (if rather slowly: They should be fixed/improved, but we shouldn’t allow the Luddites to force a return to manual counting), but the MSP election was badly messed up by poorly considered ballot layout, and insufficient effort to inform the public ahead of time. Education, Education, Education? Who said that then?

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 6th, 2007 at 2:49 pm and is filed under Glasgow, Politics, Scotland, Scottish elections, UK, Voting reform. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.