High number of spoiled papers puts spotlight on new system

The decision to hold three elections using three different voting systems on the same day also came in for severe criticism. The use of electronic vote counting for the first time also led to delays across the country, including Fife and East Kilbride.

Alex Salmond, the SNP leader, used his victory speech in Gordon to attack the voting system used.

He said the fact that thousands of votes went uncounted was "totally unacceptable in a democratic society".

Turnout figures were also much lower than predicted - but that was at least in part due to the fact that spoiled papers do not count towards turnout. In Glasgow Anniesland, 1736 votes were rejected, while in Airdrie and Shotts the number of spoiled papers - 1536 - was bigger than the majority secured by Labour's Karen Whitefield.

David Cairns, the deputy Scottish Secretary, urged the Electoral Commission, which will conduct an investigation into how the election was conducted, to focus on the large number of rejected papers.

He said: "It is inevitable that the Electoral Commission's report will focus on this issue of the spoiled ballot papers. This is not a feature of the machines because any paper that has any dubiety about it whatsoever is shown to a human being. It may be that people have put 1s and 2s when they should have put crosses and it's important that the Electoral Commission do look at this."

Before the first result was even in, Tommy Sheridan, the Solidarity leader, predicted a surge in spoiled ballot papers as a result of the combination of the new voting system and staging parliamentary and local polls on the same day.

He said: "I do have to say on behalf of all the people who complained to me today that it was utterly wrong to have the council election on the same day as the Scottish Parliament election, utterly wrong, and especially with the new voting system.

"I think there will be an awful lot of spoiled ballot papers with people putting crosses where they should have put numbers, and I think that it's an experiment which has gone wrong."

In Motherwell and Wishaw, the first count to be announced, there were 970 spoiled ballot papers and a turnout of 48.45% - down slightly on four years ago.

Turnout in Glasgow Kelvin was 42.7%. But the large number of spoiled papers, 1195, increased concerns that the new counting system may be running into problems.

In Dundee West, where the SNP gained its first seat of the night from Labour, there was a turnout of 48.8% and 978 spoiled papers. The apparently low turnouts were the continuation of a trend which has been developing for 10 years.

With the odd exception, turnout for elections in recent years have been steadily declining. Indeed, Mr Salmond's prediction of a turnout of at least 60% this time round would have been cause for dismay barely 15 years ago. Through the 1970s, 1980s, and into the 1990s, General Election turnouts of around 75% in Scotland were very much the norm.

The emergence of New Labour as the major political force in the country, however, has coincided with a wave of voter apathy which has seen turnout drop dramatically.

In 1979, when Margaret Thatcher swept to power, just under 77% of Scots eligible to vote went to the polls.

In the Conservatives' landslide victory in 1983, turnout slipped to around 73%, but it rose to 75% four years later when the Tories were voted in for a third term.

Roughly the same proportion of voters went to the polls in 1992 when John Major led the Conservatives to victory, but since then there has been an almost continuous downward slide.

In the Labour landslide of 1997, turnout was a still-respectable 71.4% as the country turned against the Tories. By 2001, though, that had plummeted to barely 58%.

Undoubtedly, this was partly because, with the Conservatives under William Hague trailing massively in the polls, the result was already a foregone conclusion. It was a similar story in 2005 and again turnout was a deeply disappointing 61%.