Seonachan has started a thread giving the results for the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly elections. I have added some posts on the English local council elections. While the results are pointing towards the Scottish Nationalists becoming the largest party in the Parliament, there are increasing worries that the electoral system has seriously affected the result, with the number of spoilt ballot papers exceeding the majority in at least one constituency seat election.
There seems to have been considerable confusion caused by holding elections for Scottish local elections on the same day. This has resulted in each elector getting three different ballot papers, to be marked in different ways.
As Seonachan explains in his diary, for the Parliament elections voters have two separate ballot papers. The first is for an MSP for the local constituency, just like in the USA House of Representatives. These are marked with an "X" against the name of the candidate you want to vote for. To make things easier, the party affiliations are included. So if you wanted to vote for a particular party, you look down the list to you see something like:
SALMOND, Alex
Scottish National Party
You then mark an X in the box next to his name. The candidate with the most votes, even this is not a plurality and only one more than the next candidate.
The next ballot is for MSPs from a regional list. The country is divided into 8 regions which elect 7 MSPs each. To vote, you mark a cross against the party list you support. The seats are allocated according to the popularity of each party.
The complicating factor in this election is that a new system has been introduced for voting for the council seats. This is by "single transferable votes" in multi-member constituencies. This allows a voter to split their vote if they prefer another party's candidate over one from their main preference. To do this, the voter marks a "1" against the candidate they favor the most, "2" against the next and so on until they run out of preferences or fill the ballot.
The counts are the most complicated element to this as a successful candidate has to get a "quota" of 50%. To do this, you sort out the first preference votes. If nobody gets 50%+1 ballot papers marked with a "1" against their name, the person with the least "1" votes drops out. Their "second preferences" are then distributed among the other candidates. The lowest keeps on dropping out until one person gets over the 50% mark. The actual number of the quota is reduced if somebody has put a "2" against a candidate who has already dropped out.
They are then elected and the quota now reduces 50%+1 of the first preferences of the remaining candidates plus the elected person's second preference votes for them, for the time being the ballot papers from the already excluded losing candidates are ignored. The dropping-out procedure continues but with only their valid second preference being counted.
This results in a horribly complicated count, even if the process is quite simple for the voter. The recalculation of the quota as each candidate drops out or is elected can be a nightmare.
The trouble with the Scottish elections is that people are making these STV votes with a cross or numbering where they should put a cross. For the constituency member elections, invalid votes of over 1000 have been occurring. This may very well increase when the count for the local elections starts.
The solution would appear to be to separate the elections for the Parliament from the Council ones. The logic behind holding both together was to increase turnout but it looks like this is at the expense of a possible distortion of voter intentions.