Westminster ministers last night put the blame on returning officers for allowing counting machines at May's elections to reject many voting papers without any human oversight.
A BBC Newsnight Scotland investigation discovered that many of the 14,000 ballot papers were rejected as spoiled through a process of "auto-adjudication".
Political parties, whose candidates and agents present at the counts did not realise that many papers did not go through a human adjudication process, were quick to blame the Scotland Office, which was ultimately responsible for the ill-fated arrangements in May. But a spokesman for the Scotland Office responded: "The allegation that the Scotland Office took the sole decision on auto-adjudication is completely untrue and without foundation.
"Decisions on the election were taken as part of a collective decision-making process by the Scottish Executive, Scotland Office, returning officers and other relevant stakeholders."
On the latest specific allegation, he said: "In the instance of auto-adjudication for the count on May 3, the decision was taken between returning officers and the e-counting provider. The Scotland Office did not, at any stage in the process, overrule those decisions or give instructions to the contrary."
Holyrood ballot papers had two columns, one for the constituency vote and one for the regional list. Where papers were wrongly marked, with numbers instead of crosses or with two crosses in one of the columns, these would go for adjudication by the returning officer's staff observed by party representatives.
But it has now emerged that if one of these columns had no marking on it at all, the machines were programmed to reject that as a spoil, while accepting a valid vote in the other column.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article