Tom Sheilds

Election Re-Run?

Cult diarists turned Guest Blogger Tom Sheids reflects on what it was like to be a witness to history at the Glasgow count centre on election night - Govan no more!

We have our brave new dawn with Labour no longer the biggest party in Holyrood. But the night before was pretty gruesome.

My remit for the Sunday Herald during the election campaign was to report on the minority parties and elicit some humour from their more outré manifesto promises.The scenes at the Glasgow election count in the SECC had aspects distinctly more ludicrous than anything the craziest of candidates could make up.

Perhaps I have an over-developed sense of the ridiculous but it struck me as odd that a burger van should be imported to provide sustenance through the long night of counting. Parties had been lecturing the electorate on the importance of healthy eating and here we were confronted by a diet of cheesy chips. Even cheesier were the antics of some of the parties’ camp followers. (Not a reference to the two Christian parties’ antipathy to the gay lifestyle.) We are used to bad blood between SNP and Labour. But a scuffle between a Labour MP and a Muslim Christian People’s Alliance candidate is a development we can live without. The sight of police wading in to the crowd at an election count is not edifying, particularly on a night when the task is to rebuild a nation.

The real challenge to self-belief was happening in the counting hall where the chaos was beyond belief. At least in Glasgow, if not elsewhere, the electronic counting technology was working passably well.
The confusion had been caused by the decision to have both the Holyrood regional list and constituency ballots on one piece of paper. Voters knew they had two choices to make but hundreds of thousands of them obviously had no clue how or where o make their marks.The new technology gave observers the opportunity to watch on big screens as dubious or debatable ballot papers were scrutinised. It would have been hilarious were it not so serious. Some papers resembled a bingo card marked by a demented player. Others, littered with various versions of 12X, looked like efforts to win the football pools.

When the fun was over, about 150,000 voters had been disenfranchised. I am no expert in constitutional matters but I quickly formed the opinion that we had here was an invalid election which should really be run again with ballot papers that are easier to understand. I do not voice this opinion too loudly in case someone in authority agrees. As Bob Dylan sang, what do we have to pay to get out of going through all these things twice.

The election campaign was long and tiring process. There is nothing worse than politicians pretending they are interested in what people think. Actually, there is. It’s TV and radio presenters getting on election buses and pretending to be interested in what members of the public think. From my point of view, it was worth the effort to get a long-overdue regime change in Scotland. Unless, of course, Jack and the conservatives in the Labour Party have managed to do a coalition deal with Auntie Annabel and the Conservatives.

Tom

Comments

[Peter Curran]

Tom, I agree with most of what you say, but where does this figure of 150,000 spoiled ballot papers come from? It has already been quoted on YouScotland.com, but the highest figure I have seen in the media is 100,000. If you and YouScotland know something that the rest of us don't, let's hear it. Otherwise, it doesn't do any good to inflate an already horrendous figure.

Apropos the ballot papers themselves -

My wife and I spent about twenty minutes before we went to the polling station on Thursday familiarising ourselves with the ballot papers. The risks were blindingly obvious - put a number where there should be a cross, a cross where there should be a number, two crosses where there should be only one, and the ballot paper was spoiled.

We are both reasonably intelligent people, but when we got to the polling station, we readily sought reinforcement of our understanding from the helpful and knowledgeable staff. Even then, there was a moment of doubt and isolation in the booths. When we left after casting our votes, we did speculate how many voters were truly prepared for the experience - the young first-time voters, the elderly and infirm, the busy people squeezing in their votes in a working day, the harassed young mothers - how many would make an all-to-understandable slip of the pencil?

However, in a wider sense, we are all to blame for not speaking out in advance about our reservations about this deeply flawed system. To adapt an old Scottish joke, it will now be said "Lord, Lord, we didnae ken!" and the Lord will reply, "Aye, weel ye ken noo ---" At a time of new beginning for Scottish politics, we are now an international laughing stock, and will go down in history with the hanging chads of Florida. Those who are hostile to the new Scotland will laugh, rejoice, and exploit our weakness.

But the greatest danger lies in the insidious voices that have emerged suggesting that those who had difficulty completing their ballot paper on polling day are not fit to have a vote. Therein lies an atavistic slide back to deciding who is intelligent enough, educated enough and perhaps privileged and rich enough to vote. That way lies darkness and danger for our democracy.

P.S. I have already said most of the above in a letter to 'The Herald' but I think I missed the boat - most of it was said by other letter writers on Friday.

[Dave Holladay]

Tom

There, with Buffer Towers on the very edge of my prospective balliwick, and an independent candidate too yet you never sought out our campaign to give the Council a Holladay. Still I did learn a lot from the experience.

First, I rent out the flat I bought in 1990, and moved from in 1999, and know fairly well those who currently live in the close. Thus when putting out the bulk collection on Wednesday 2nd I saw that the postal delivery (sic) had, on finding no number 93 (a former shop on the ground floor of a 7 flat close) had left some Election Communications (and presumably voting cards) lying on the table we have for lost and abandoned mail (as the postie no longer accepts anything to take back for return to the sender's address). This immediately got my nose twitching. Two members of a sikh family (Singh) were registed as voters for an address which had (in the eyes of the city council assessor) ceased to exist around 4 years ago when the shop, which had been closed up since 1998, was converted to a flat. We are very keen to find out when this registration was last signed for. However it gets worse. As a candidate I get a pack which includes the electoral register and that includes the close in question. There are 18 names recorded as voters of which only 2 are actually current residents. One family moved out in 1999, two other people registed at the same address moved out in 2001. I haven't seen any occupants for one flat with a voter registered there - when it was cleared out in preparation for getting it back into use, mail dating back to 1992 was lying inside the door. Effectively for this sample of the electoral register only 11% of the names were valid - so maybe it isn't low turnouts we get but instead we have a nominal 22,400 voters on the electoral roll and potentially less than half actually exist as voters. My small sample is not isolated, an actress I know remarked that she had noted another Equity member long ago moved to London, who still had a Glasgow vote at her old address, and the case is strong for a thorough review of the registers of voters. However as an interim measure I suggest that we urge individuals to break this task down to their own action on their own close or street, and in doing so perhaps get to know their neighbours better, by checking the entries for their own small part of the register. If my own experienc is repeated on a wider scale we have some very serious questions to ask about how constituencies have been defined, and the validity of those polling analyses.

Second I have to give great praise to those faced with the task of validation of questionable papers, as we watched their efforts on then big screens (apart from Ward 10 which managed to vanish from the software). But for their skill and commonsense we would have seen even more invalid votes where an x was then given a number as well, or converted to a 1 and (hopefully as the voter had intended) the 1's which looked like 2's or 7's and the 4's which were read as 9's were allocated appropriately. This does however leave a major question mark against the use of numbers on a voting form. Only a basic mark such as a cross or tick passes the test of being indisputably the intended wish of the voter, when the confusion between written numbers can occur. Many older voters also found the fact that their votes were not kept private by the old and long accepted standard of folding the voting papers before putting them in the ballot boxes. Thus many ballot papers were folded and had to be unfolded again. So in future if a proportional vote requires a choice of more than 1 candidate, we have a natrix of candidate and choice number, which is marked by just one X in each column/row.

Disappointed that I did not get in naturally but I was firm that I wasn't going to join a party just to improve my chances and get a back-up team. Still maybe some of my ideas will be taken up by those who did win places.

[AutismRights]

I note that it is not clear whether or not the Electoral Commission's report to the minister informed him that separate voting papers for constituency and list votes resulted in fewer mistakes in the sample of people selected to test drive each of the options for voting. That's why we need a full, independent investigation into the preparations for and administration of the election.

Although I had read about the voting papers prior to going to the polling station, and I have coped with some very time-consuming and complicated forms in my day, I was thrown slightly by the thing that a number of people have picked up on - that was the `you have 2 votes` - which was followed by `you have one vote` in light typeface. It could have been much clearer - it was only because I was very familiar with what was actually required, that I had sufficient confidence to know I had voted correctly. The layout and wording combined was not absolutely obvious - and for a ballot paper, it should have been.

Like Peter Curran, in his letter to the Herald, I do not accept that it is tough luck on those who got in wrong - some of whom might have learning disabilities, or just be less than confident of confusing ballot papers which, let's face it, they would have expected to be absolutely obvious. People would not necessarily have clung on to any literature explaining how to cast their vote - although I note that all advice on this on the Vote Scotland site (£2 million quid down the pan) has been removed. I don't remember any clear advice on the leaflet that dropped through our letter box - although I'll attempt to locate another one for reference.

In any case, frustrating though it may be for the rest of us, why should supposed intelligence be a criteria for voting, as against morality? Those who are casting the voters who spoiled their ballot papers as thick would do well to remember that it is actually a sign of intelligence to see more than one possibility in choices that are presented - check out Alice Heim's critique of standard IQ tests and how those really bright guys who wrote them were unable to work out that questions that they believed had only one answer actually had several - think how confusing that was for children trying to answer IQ test questions, when they could see more than one possible answer to a question!

However, I think we should be very careful of concentrating quite so hard on the spoiled ballot papers, when there would appear to have been just as many postal votes discounted - does anyone have a figure for these? I have only seen a figure of 100,000 - virtually the same as for the spoiled ballot papers?

This story appeared in the Observer on Sunday, and mentions an organisation that could be contacted to jump start action on the petition for an internationally supervised enquiry on the election:-

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/polit...073641,00.html

http://www.fairvote.org/?page=14 - this gives background to the chap who is mentioned in the article above, and this is his email address:-

rr@fairvote.org

[Peter Curran]

Apologies, Tom - you were right about the number of spoilt ballot papers. How did you know?

Peter Curran

http://moridura.blogspot.com

[Manchester United]

That's awesome. I'm so glad you started blogging and that I can call you my friend. Keep posting and I'll keep reading.