Spoiling tactics turned confusion to fiasco

Alan Mc Coombes

It’s not who votes that counts, it’s who counts the votes said Josef Stalin. The New Labour establishment could have taught the commissars of the old Soviet Union a thing or two about manipulating elections. If 100,000 votes had been disqualified in Venezuela, politicians and newspaper editors would be calling for the tanks to be sent in to restore democracy.

In Scotland, it looks like the response to this mass disenfranchisement of a vast swathe of the electorate will be a whitewash, with the Electoral Commission asked to investigate the Electoral Commission. Alex Salmond, the SNP leader, has called for a full judicial inquiry - a call that has been rejected by the man responsible for the debacle, the Scottish Secretary, Douglas Alexander. In Glasgow, lawyer Mike Dailly has begun legal proceedings.

The SSP should support both of these moves. This democratic abomination was not the result of incompetence by the Scotland Office.

It was a product of a deliberate, cynical manoeuvre by New Labour politicians to confuse the public and marginalise the smaller parties. Since 1999, Labour has consciously undermined local democracy by refusing to separate the council elections from the Holyrood elections.

In this election, when council elections were conducted for the first time under PR, the case for a change was overwhelming. But it was never put before the Scottish Parliament. A Tory MSP had begun to initiate a private members bill, but, after what appeared to be backdoor wheeling and dealing, dropped the proposal. Even worse was the decision to swap the order of the Holyrood ballot papers and to include the constituency and regional votes on a single form for the first time. This was a deliberate subversion of democracy, designed to protect the big parties and undermine the diversity of Holyrood.

The SNP went along with this ploy, hoping that they too would benefit from the confusion. They opportunistically attempted to manipulate the new arrangements by renaming their party - Alex Salmond for First Minister SNP, reinforcing the confusion that already existed.

The SSP can report numerous examples of voters including even party members – marking their X against Alex Salmond then scrolling down the regional list to vote SSP. All of these votes would have been discounted.

Ironically, the SNP’s tactic has almost certainly backfired on the party. Their cunning plan was that voters would back Alex Salmond on the left side of the paper, then be forced to vote again for the SNP on the right side of the ballot paper when they realised that the smaller parties were not listed on that side.

What the SNP failed to anticipate was that a large proportion of voters would mark both their crosses on the left side of the ballot paper. Because the regional and constituency ballot papers were not physically separate, tens of thousands of people appear to have believed that it didn’t matter which side they marked their two crosses. This would not only distort downwards the vote for the smaller parties; it would also negate many thousands of constituency votes, particularly for the SNP.

Without a full analysis of every paper, it is impossible to say how the results were affected by confusion. However it is wishful thinking for Tommy Sheridan to claim he was robbed of a seat in Glasgow. The claim that with just a few hundred more votes, Solidarity would have won a seat in Glasgow is pure fiction. Out of around 10,000 disqualified regional votes in Glasgow, Sheridan would have required 2,200 to beat the Greens and 2,600 extra votes to beat the SNP and even that would be based on the far-fetched assumption that neither of these parties had any disqualified votes!

In Glasgow as elsewhere, it is likely that the vote for the SSP, the Greens, Solidarity and a range of other small parties would have been significantly higher, but nowhere near enough to affect the outcome.

Nonetheless, this distortion of democracy blatantly discriminates against the most deprived voters in the poorest constituencies who are already disproportionately excluded from electoral politics.

The constituency with the highest number of disqualified papers, Glasgow Shettleston, was also the constituency with the lowest turnout in Scotland, just 33 per cent. And by the way, just in case you didn’t know - Shettleston also tops the UK league table for poverty and deprivation.