It seems that approximately 100,000 ballot papers were discounted as invalid/spoilt in last week’s Scottish Parliament elections.
Amy Rodger, the Scotland director for the Electoral Reform Society, told the BBC it was too early to jump to conclusions over what had gone wrong… before – wouldn’t you know it? – concluding that:
“From what we have seen about the ballot papers that were filled in wrongly, it does seem to be something about the way it was designed or the instructions that were given.”
First of all, if it’s too early to draw any conclusions, stop drawing fucking conclusions.
Second, why must the ‘problem’ be to do with the design of the ballot paper and not to do with too many lazy and/or barely literate electors who can’t be arsed to read things properly? (For the avoidance of doubt, this is not an equally lazy (but almost certainly barely literate) diatribe against the Scots, but against all Britons.)
The Minister – along with his fellow electors in the “northern Home Counties” town in which he now lives – is one of the few English voters who can comment on this issue with any sort of legitimacy because the ballot papers we used last week were exactly the same as the Scottish ones.This town had two elections last Thursday – one for the borough council, one for the Mayoralty – and both used different voting systems. The borough council was elected according to the traditional ‘first past the post’, ‘stick one cross next to one name’ system. The Mayor was elected according the ‘single transferable vote’, ‘put numbers next to candidates’ names’ system.
The ballot papers here looked exactly the same as the example Scottish ones shown on the gogglebox and reprinted in the tabs over recent days. The ballot papers contained precisely the same instructions.
And, er, we successfully re-elected our (independent) Mayor and returned another hung council (for the 21st consecutive year) with no appreciable difficulties and without any significant increase in invalidated ballots. The word ‘chaos’ did not figure in any report about these elections on Look East or in the local rags.
I concede that the two electors in this household are more educated than the average (though not necessarily any brighter) but the instructions were perfectly adequate if you bothered to read them. If you didn’t do that, then you may very well have put crosses where you should have put numbers and/or vice versa but – frankly – it’s then your own fucking stupid fault if your vote is disqualified and the only sympathy I have is with those who CAN’T – as opposed to WON’T – read the ballot paper properly.
This isn’t an MFI flatpack, for fucksake. It’s your vote – your democratic duty for which (cliche, cliche) millions of people have died. Have some fucking (self-)respect.
This electoral ‘chaos’ is hardly the same thing as the gerrymandering perpetrated by ‘Dame’ Shirley Porter in the 1980s, or the flagrant breaches of electoral law that took place in Florida in November 2000. For that, people should have been strung up. For this, people should simply think twice about whining about the rancid egomaniacs who now find themselves on the fortunate end of a Holyrood expenses account.
I’ve been a vocal proponent of proportional representation for 20 years. On this showing, this idiotic electorate gets everything it deserves.
I have a smidgin of suspicion that you are trying to provoke a debate here so I’ll play the game. By and large, I agree with the principle that if you didn’t read the instructions properly, and they were as clearly put together as they could have been, then you have only yourself to blame.
I make this comment without having seen the ballot papers but I can however see the argument that if there is scope on the ballot for someone with an IQ of 100 to fuck it up, then as a matter of principle, it must be too complicated.
In other words, if you are asking people to put crosses in one place and numbers in another place (and perhaps for both to be done or the vote is spoiled), you are asking for trouble because however good the instructions are you exponentially increase the opportunity for a screw up.
I know that’s like setting a field for bad bowling, but when you know how bad your bowlers are, you don’t actually have much of a choice. Believe me – I know.
If 100,000 people (we can assume most of whom had an IQ of 100 or below) fucked it up, doesn’t that represent a real error by the election administrators for even creating the circumstances for that to happen?
What matters more than our sympathy for the cretins who screwed up, is the damage to the system that this level of fuck-up has done – people got elected by tiny margins (double figures in some areas) where that number was swamped by hundreds of spoiled ballot papers.
If we ever brought in a system of proportional representation in this country, I feel sure we would need (and get) election broadcasts for 2 weeks to teach people how to vote. They do that in African countries when they bring in free elections for the first time for the uneducated populace.
But the idea surely is that even if you are lazy and stupid, that isn’t a good enough reason to disenfranchise you. Those people did deliberately go and vote, after all. We have a responsibility, up to a point, to make sure votes are counted. I remain to be convinced that this point was reached on this occasion.