SNP rocked by suspected vote-rigging

THE Scottish National Party has been forced to take action to prevent what is suspected to be an orchestrated attempt to rig the selection process that determines which of its candidates make it to Holyrood at next year's parliamentary elections.

Scotland on Sunday has learned that SNP bosses became suspicious after hundreds of new members – most of whom are understood to have Asian surnames – suddenly joined the party in the west of Scotland region just in time to vote for their favoured candidates in this summer's battle for Holyrood selection.

The West of Scotland region is expected to be one of the SNP's toughest internal battlegrounds this summer with a number of well-known candidates fighting for seats.

Concerned that the SNP's internal selection procedure, which is based on the votes of ordinary members, would be skewed unfairly by the unexpected influx of new members, the SNP's National Executive Committee last week moved to exclude them from the process. Members of the NEC voted in favour of changing the deadline for voting eligibility in the region from 20 June to 6 June, so barring any new members who joined after the latter date from taking part in the ballot.

The NEC was alerted by the SNP group on East Dunbartonshire Council after the sudden appearance of hundreds of new members.

There was concern that a handful of individuals had appeared to have paid the 12 subscription fees for the new members, some of whom had previously been identified as Tories when the SNP had been out canvassing, in a practice known as "bulk buying".

Although no party rules had been broken, the NEC decided that action had to be taken in case the system had been abused. "Suddenly, they got this avalanche of people joining and alarm bells started ringing," an SNP source said yesterday.

"A very large number of extra names suddenly appeared on the list. People thought, wait a second, what's going on here?

"Inquiries were made and it was decided that a large number of people within two weeks of the deadline was a bit dodgy and took action to remedy the situation. I think there were hundreds of names, so you can draw your own conclusions.

"You could probably slip 30 or 40 names through a region, but not the number that actually occurred. It doesn't seem very democratic if people come up on the list at the last minute."

Under the Scottish Parliament's proportional representation system 56 out of Holyrood's 129 MSPs owe their seats to the list system that sees seven members being voted in for each of Scotland's eight electoral regions.

Each party draws up a list of candidates for each region and each hopeful is ranked. Those ranked at the top of the list stand the best chance of making it to Holyrood.

In the SNP's case, the ranking of candidates is done by a postal ballot that sees a region's members rate their candidates in order of preference.

To have a vote in the selection of next year's Holyrood candidates, SNP members had to have joined the party by 20 June.

Scotland on Sunday understands that as the deadline loomed, around 300 new members joined en masse at the end of a fortnight that had seen an unusually large number of people applying for party membership. The majority of the names were of Asian origin, a disproportionately large number given the make-up of the membership, said another SNP source.

An SNP spokesman said: "This demonstrates that the SNP's procedures are totally robust.

"Our priority is electing all our candidates over the summer and getting out there to win next year's election for Scotland."

At the moment there are four SNP MSPs who were elected on the West of Scotland top-up list: Gil Paterson, Stuart McMillan, Bill Wilson, and Stewart Maxwell. The Cunninghame North constituency MSP, Kenny Gibson, is expected to be vying for a high list ranking as his constituency seat is under threat from Labour.

Also expected to be standing on the top-up list is Osama Saeed, a high-profile and controversial SNP candidate who was formerly the chief executive of Scottish Islamic Foundation.

Saeed, a former adviser to Alex Salmond, has been nominated, although not yet selected, as a potential candidate for the Strathkelvin and Bearsden constituency – a seat he has fought for the SNP in the past and which is part of the West of Scotland region.

As candidates fighting constituencies are automatically put on the top-up list, Osama's name is likely to be in the mix.

Saeed was in charge of the Scottish Islamic Foundation when it emerged that he received taxpayers' money to organise a series of festivals that were cancelled. W

Most of the 400,000 was handed back after the events failed to materialise.