The Election: What went wrong?

IT WAS a night that will be remembered less for the eventual winner than for the fiasco surrounding what ought to have been a simple process: counting the votes.

The introduction of a new electronic counting system combined with a new single ballot paper for both the constituency and top-up list votes for the Scottish Parliament resulted in delays to scores of counts and thousands of spoiled votes.

Why did it go so badly wrong?

SNP leader Alex Salmond blamed the decision to hold the council elections on the same day as the Holyrood elections under a new single transferable vote (STV) system of proportional representation. He is right. The complexity of the STV system requires electronic counting equipment. Ministers decided to go the whole hog and introduce electronic counting for the Holyrood elections at the same time.

Returning officers who warned that the counts should not begin until Friday morning because the system, although tested, was untried on an election night, were over-ruled.

Two major things went wrong:Counting machines operated by the firm DRS failed, resulting in counts being suspended in the early hours in Aberdeen, Argyll & Bute, some Edinburgh seats, Eastwood, Linlithgow, Livingtson, Perth and Tayside North and Strathkelvin & Bearsden until later today.

Voters appeared confused about the new ballot papers, which carried on the left-hand side a list of those standing for list seats and on the right candidates for constituency seats. Instead of putting one cross in a box on each side, many voters put two crosses in separate boxes on the left, invalidating their ballot. There are estimates of at least 100,000 spoiled papers - which means 5 per cent of voters were disenfranchised.

In one seat, Airdrie and Shotts, 1,536 papers were rejected - more than Labour's margin of victory in the seat.

The Scotland Office, which was responsible for administering the election, ordered an investigation by the independent Electoral Commission.

Alan Campbell, returning officer for Aberdeenshire, said ministers in the Scottish Executive had ignored advice to delay the count.

"All the returning officers in Scotland did recommend to Scottish ministers that we, in fact, start this whole count process on Friday morning rather than on Thursday evening," Mr Campbell said.

"Our advice was rejected. We went along with it. People have done their best, but clearly this is a new system and there will be occasional glitches. Staff have not worked on this before," he added.

Ken Ritchie, chief executive of The Electoral Reform Society, said: "It is clear that the fault is not a consequence of the voting system. When the system was first used in 1999, the number of spoilt ballots was less than 1 per cent. We need to understand what has gone so wrong as to increase this number more than tenfold.

"Neither is the fault in the electronic counting technology. While the counting equipment has experienced teething problems in some areas, it is not the equipment that has caused people to make mistakes in the completion of their ballot papers."

In his speech after winning the Gordon constituency, Mr Salmond said: "It is also the case that the decision to conduct an STV election at the same time as a first-past-the-post ballot for the Scottish Parliament was deeply mistaken.

"As a direct result, tens of thousands of votes across Scotland have been discounted. That is totally unacceptable in a democratic society."