Scottish
Election Fiasco Casts
Doubt Over New Parliament
By Niall Green
12 May, 2007
World
Socialist Web
The
actual number of votes rejected in the May 3 elections to the Scottish
Parliament is far higher than the already staggering figure of 100,000
previously admitted to. Earlier this week, Newsnight Scotland revealed
that some 142,000 votes had been ruled out—3.5 percent of all
votes cast.
Of these, 85,644 votes were
rejected for the first-past-the post constituency elections, which account
for 57 of the 129 seats in Holyrood. A further 56,247 votes were rejected
from the regional lists, an Additional Member form of proportional representation
that makes up the rest of the parliamentary seats.
In addition to this total,
many more votes were discounted for elections to local councils held
on the same day. A number of seats in the new parliament were won by
majorities less than the number of spoiled ballots.
Failures in the system of
postal voting also contributed to the disenfranchising of voters, with
hundreds of people receiving their postal ballot too late.
Given that the Scottish count
involves the largest number of rejected ballots in British electoral
history, the efforts of nearly all concerned parties to simply move
on to next business is telling. Had such a massive level of voter disenfranchisement
occurred in Russia, Zimbabwe or Venezuela, the British government would
be joining the European Union and Washington in condemning the election
as a fraud and calling for a revote.
Yet in this instance there
has been very little serious treatment of the election fiasco, beyond
the concern that it has proven to be a “national embarrassment.”
Facing questions at Westminster,
Labour’s secretary of state for Scotland, Douglas Alexander, said,
“There is a statutory review, which has begun, by the Electoral
Commission. I’ve made clear that where that inquiry touches on
matters directly within the responsibility of the Electoral Commission
there will be independent assessment.”
This leaves the body largely
responsible for the problems in the election charged with investigating
itself. Faced with criticisms that such a review would do nothing to
placate public outrage, on May 10 the commission finally agreed to appoint
an “independent international expert” to look into the disaster
surrounding the count.
In many instances, the election
fiasco has been blamed on the voters. Reports cite enormous confusion
amongst people over the various ballot papers and the different ways
of completing them. There is no question that the ballot was confusing,
but this begs the question as to why it was organised in such a manner
in the first place.
Responsibility rests with
all the main parties in Holyrood, and, in particular, with the Labour
Party.
In previous elections to
the Scottish Parliament, two separate ballot papers had been issued
for the constituency and regional lists. In preparation for the 2007
ballot, however, this was changed to place both elections on the same
ballot paper. In addition, it was decided to hold local council elections
on the same day as the parliamentary vote, using another ballot paper
with another completely different form of voting—the Single Transferable
Vote system.
It has emerged that Alexander
was warned by civil servants at the Scotland Office that changing the
ballot forms would lead to confusion and a higher than average number
of rejected votes. Tests were carried out on behalf of the Electoral
Commission by Cragg Ross Dawson, a market research company, on a sample
of 100 people. They found that the single ballot paper option was the
method that produced the most confusion and the greatest number of invalidated
ballots.
Despite these warnings, the
Electoral Commission and the Scotland Office continued with the new
procedure, publishing partial results of the survey and neglecting to
mention the negative findings about their proposal.
Robert Richie, executive
director of US-based Fair Vote, which observed the election, compared
the result to the vote suppression in Florida during the 2000 US presidential
election. “The most fundamental flaw was the ballot design of
the party and constituency votes in two columns on the same page, rather
than on separate pages,” he said.
Fair Vote’s analysis
of the rejected ballots has indicated that smaller parties, especially
the Greens, were especially disadvantaged by the high level of rejected
votes on the regional lists.
Alex Salmond, leader of the
Scottish National Party (SNP), has called for an independent judicial
inquiry and criticised Labour’s management of the election. However,
the SNP and the Liberal Democrats supported the new single parliamentary
ballot paper when it was put to them in consultation.
The massive scale of voter
disenfranchisement, predicted by the Scotland Office’s own research
calls into question the whole election. But Labour, the SNP and the
Liberals are not prepared to acknowledge this because it would jeopardise
their positions in the new parliament.
The Scottish National Party
(SNP) has a great deal to lose if the election result is challenged.
It won 47 seats in the parliament, just one more than Labour. The SNP
are currently in coalition discussions with the Liberal Democrats and
the Greens to form a government. In addition, their nationalist rhetoric
is not best served by exposures of incompetence in Holyrood.
The Liberal Democrats, who
oppose the SNP’s policy of holding a referendum on Scottish separatism,
may opt for a less formal coalition with the SNP that does not tie them
to voting for the referendum. Labour may also try to form a coalition
with the Liberals.
However, it is still possible
that the result may be brought into question—and by the very party
that bears the greatest responsibility for what happened. In the constituency
of Cunningham North, the SNP beat the incumbent Labour member Allan
Wilson by just 48 votes. Wilson is consulting with Labour Party lawyers
on whether to launch a legal challenge to have a manual recount of the
ballots.
A great deal is at stake,
given that a shift of one seat away from the SNP would make Labour the
majority party and potential head of a coalition government with the
Liberal Democrats. If this happened, the SNP could possibly respond
with its own challenge in one or more constituencies where Labour won
only a narrow victory.
Glasgow lawyer Mike Dailly
of the Govan Law Centre is also challenging the results on the grounds
that the parliamentary ballot paper was so complicated that it infringed
the right to vote.
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