Reform on cards to end council vote name 'bias'

CANDIDATES in council elections could in future be listed in random order on the ballot paper to avoid a built-in bias in favour of people whose names come early in the alphabet.

At the last local government elections in 2007 - the first where voters ranked candidates in order of preference - at least six senior Edinburgh councillors who lost their seats could have been affected by the fact their names came below those of party colleagues.

Research has now established that across Scotland there were 247 cases where candidates who appeared higher on the ballot paper got more votes than a candidate from the same party further down the list, and only 53 cases where the lower-placed candidate got more votes.

Voting reform campaigners Fairshare said: "The probability of such an unequal distribution occurring purely by chance is less than one in a million billion billion billion."

A recently-completed Scottish Government consultation produced a range of alternative suggestions, including drawing lots to decide the order of names on the ballot paper, producing a random order or printing a variety of ballot papers ensuring every possible permutation of names is used.

Ministers are now considering the responses to the consultation before drawing up the regulations for the 2012 local government elections.

International elections expert Ron Gould, called in to investigate after the 2007 fiasco over electronic counting, recommended a public lottery to determine ballot paper positioning.

In its response to the consultation, Fairshare said the bias could only be removed by "full randomisation", where a computer produces a random order every time it prints a ballot paper, meaning every possible permutation is equally probable.

Many local authorities backed the traditional alphabetical order because that is what voters expected. Concerns were also voiced that people with literacy difficulties or sight problems could be confused if candidates were not in alphabetical order.

Dr Ken Ritchie, former chief executive of the Electoral Reform Society, and colleague Lewis Baston said the government should commission further research on alternatives.

Opt2Vote, part of the consortium which has won the contract to provide electronic counting for the 2012 elections, said it had the technology to allow random ordering.

In 2007, when the Single Transferable Vote was introduced for council elections, with bigger wards electing three or four councillors each, senior Labour councillors Trevor Davies, Billy Fitzpatrick and Lawrence Marshall all lost their seats while colleagues in the same ward with names higher up the alphabet got elected.

The same happened to Liberal Democrats Tom Ponton, Sue Tritton and Liz O'Malley.

A Scottish Government spokeswoman said: "We will set out how we plan to proceed in due course."