Voters in Scotland's poorest communities were twice as likely to have their votes rejected in last May's ballot fiasco as the average for Scotland.

The astonishing finding has come from Strathclyde University research, which suggests that Glasgow was by far the worst affected.

Social deprivation - including low educational attainment, poor health and unemployment - was the biggest factor leading to variation in rejection, even after other factors have been calculated out of the complex equation.

Glasgow had eight of the 10 constituencies with the highest number of spoiled papers. In Glasgow Shettleston, 12% of votes cast were spoiled.

Dr Christopher Carman, a specialist in voting systems at Strathclyde University, has submitted his findings to the independent inquiry led by Canadian expert Ron Guild into the major problems at this year's Holyrood and council elections.

He believes 85,643 constituency votes were registered as "spoiled" and therefore not counted. A further 60,454 regional votes were treated the same way. Some constituencies had as few as 2% of their votes affected, but 16 constituencies had majorities smaller than the number of rejected ballots.

There are other reasons why there could be large numbers of spoiled ballots, including the design of the ballot paper, which was particularly unclear in Glasgow and Lothian.

There was also a slightly higher chance of rejections in large count centres, which also meant Glasgow and Lothian faced a bigger rejection than other parts of the country.

Dr Carman concluded: "The biggest predictor of the rejected ballots is social deprivation. The thing we found most problematic about it was that the constituencies with the highest levels of deprivation happen to be in Glasgow and that had a ballot paper that was hardest to figure out."

He argued this undermines the claim of the election result to be representative, in that it indicates not all sections of society had an equal role in shaping the outcome and choosing the MSPs.

Tommy Sheridan, joint leader of Solidarity, who lost his Glasgow seat in May after two terms in Holyrood, said he looks forward to the definitive version of what went wrong when Ron Gould's report is published next month.

But he added that the design of the ballot paper had worked against his campaign: "Solidarity clearly lost proportionately more votes than any other party. The number of people who ticked Alex Salmond and then Tommy Sheridan in the same column ran into the thousands and those were the votes that were discounted.

"That first column was the source of the problem. The anecdotal evidence is that I secured enough votes to be elected."

Links

  • www.scottishelections
  • www.review.org.uk