Bruce challenges Government on Scottish election fiasco

12.00.00am UTC (GMT +0000) Tue 23rd Oct 2007

Mr Bruce challenged the Secretary of State for Scotland on the election report by Ron Gould

Responding to the publication of the Gould report on the Scottish Parliamentary and council elections in May, Malcolm Bruce, the MP for Gordon and President of the Scottish Liberal Democrats asked the Secretary of State for Scotland:

"Following what my right hon. Friend the Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Mr. Kennedy) said, may I tell the Secretary of State that the problem for many people with postal ballots was not their complexity or whether the form fitted the envelope, but the fact that they never saw them, because they did not arrive in time?

"The right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field) referred to electoral systems. The single transferable vote system for local government had far fewer problems than the system for election to the Scottish Parliament. May I therefore recommend to the Secretary of State that the right thing to do is simplify the electoral systems by ensuring that they all use STV?"

The Secretary of State, Des Browne responded:

"Let me say two things to the right hon. Gentleman, who I think was making a party political point dressed up in another way. First, the failure to get the ballot papers printed and distributed in time for postal votes was, in my interpretation of the relevant chapter of the report, also a function of the fact that the ballot paper was a combined paper produced using a centralised print scheme, and the fact that the bulk of the numbers could not be processed. It all comes back to the combination of the two papers, in my view. The right hon. Gentleman is an experienced politician and he will have a chance to read the report at his leisure and come to his own conclusions, but that is my view, on two readings of the report. We might even have a chance to ask Mr. Gould whether that interpretation is right.

"Secondly, when I looked at the comparative number of spoiled or rejected papers under STV as opposed to those in the Scottish Parliament elections, which uses the first-past-the-post system and the additional member system, I came to the same conclusion as the right hon. Gentleman did. However, more careful consideration might suggest that the system of auto-adjudication under STV may have masked the number of people who did not enter their votes properly on the STV ballot paper, because it accepted votes with a cross on them, if there was only one cross. We need to be careful about coming to conclusions from a partial interpretation of the ballot papers, as there may be hidden mistakes made by people that did not come out in the rejection system."

ENDS