Ballot paper mistakes 'a repeat of Florida disaster'

John Nichols, who has written a book about the Florida vote, said bad design of the ballot paper in both cases had denied people their say in key elections.

Mr Nichols, who writes for America's The Nation magazine, attended last night's count at Ingliston as an official observer.

He said: "I have observed elections in over 20 countries and I have seen some real disasters. This was not the worst disaster, but it was a tough night - not just for a few election officials, but for Scotland. When you have 100,000 spoiled ballots in what is clearly a close contest, that is disastrous.

"Those who do not prevail are able to point to the level of spoiled papers and if it is larger than the margin of victory they can say somewhere in those spoiled ballots could be our victory. That's what happened in Florida."

He said if spoiled papers were over one per cent, it was likely there was a design flaw.

"In Flordia, the most significant problem - despite all you have heard about chads - was bad ballot design."

He claimed the decision to use a single ballot paper for both the list and the constituency vote for the Scottish Parliament had confused voters.

Mr Nichols said the paper informed people they had two votes and many thought they could place a X in any two boxes on the paper rather than one in each column.

"I'm sure what happened was sincere, informed, capable people saw 'Vote for two', knocked off their two and headed off to work."

And he said the distinctive peach and lilac colours used to distinguish the list and constituency vote made little difference.

"In ballot design, you don't rely on gimmicks or colours. The way to solve it is two separate sheets of paper."

And he said it was no use trying to blame voters for not understanding the system. He said: "If you have that level of disenfranchisement, something was wrong. You cannot say the people were stupid."