Local Government and Regeneration Committee

Meeting date: Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Official Report 510KB pdf

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Local Government Elections 2012

Our next item of business is a round-table evidence session on the 2012 Scottish local government elections. The session will be an opportunity for the committee to take a first look at the legislative consent memorandum on the United Kingdom Electoral Registration and Administration Bill. The discussion will be in two sections, and we will deal with the LCM separately at the end.

I ask our guests to introduce themselves and to say a bit about their organisations and their feelings about the experience of the election—whether it worked and whether there were problems or things that we should look at for future elections.

I am Billy Pollock. I am the chair of the Scotland and Northern Ireland branch of the Association of Electoral Administrators, which is a UK-wide organisation that represents people who are involved with electoral registration and administration below returning officer level and has about 1,600 members. Our branch has 150 members spread across the two countries that are separated by the North Channel.

It is a bit difficult for me to be here in that our first branch meeting since the elections will not take place until tomorrow, so I do not have any formal feedback from my branch members. However, through other forums, I think that the view is that the election generally went well from an administrative and organisational viewpoint.

Good morning. I am the chair of the Society of Local Authority Lawyers and Administrators in Scotland’s elections working group, a member of the e-counting project board and an adviser to the Electoral Management Board for Scotland.

On the experience so far, the SOLAR elections working group has had a debrief meeting and has fed into the EMB’s debriefing. Our conclusion is that the election went well. Some key factors were that the legislation was early, the extended timetable for the delivery of postal votes was excellent, the Logica and returning officers training was very good, and the support to the returning officers from the e-counting contractor was excellent in respect of the central support resource and the resolution of minor difficulties. There were a few minor difficulties, but the bottom line is that in a huge logistical exercise that brought vast amounts of technology to 32 locations and ROs’ teams, the logistics worked well.

Communications were good. People have mentioned the excellent “frequently asked questions” that the Scottish Government put out through its project manager, Andy Sinclair, and the two external stakeholders.

Over the piece, as the EMB’s report says, the exercise seems to have gone well from the inside looking out, but obviously we need to get feedback from outside that tells us whether that view is agreed with. Things seem to have been okay.

I am the head of the Scottish Government elections team.

The Government’s primary role in the matter is to set the legislative framework for the elections, which we did. We produced the rules for the election in November last year and, prior to that, we legislated in the previous session to establish the Electoral Management Board for Scotland to co-ordinate electoral activity and to give the Electoral Commission a formal role in monitoring local elections for the first time. We also paid for the e-counting system. We set up the contract and worked with the contractors and local authorities.

The initial indications are that things went reasonably well on the election day and in the count.

I am head of the Electoral Commission office in Scotland.

As a top line, we would say that the elections went well on the polling day and that the subsequent count went well. That said, one of our statutory duties is to report on the elections. We are currently gathering information from various sources, which we have tried to lay out in our four-page submission to the committee. We will report on the election in mid September, after members come back from the recess. If members wish to talk to us about the report at that point, we would be happy to come back.

I think that members know what the Electoral Commission does, as the predecessor committee was instrumental in giving us a statutory role as of March 2011 under the Local Electoral Administration (Scotland) Act 2011. Apart from reporting, we set standards for performance and standards for returning officers, provide guidance to electoral registration officers and returning officers, and undertake in an operational sense the national public awareness campaign for local government elections, which is Scottish Government funded. We also assist and provide resources, products and advice to the returning officers and EROs via the communications network of the Electoral Management Board for Scotland, run the observers scheme and, at the request of the Scottish Government, provide guidance to candidates and agents on the bureaucracy part of the election to keep them right.

11:00

I am contracts manager for the e-counting project. Logica was the prime contractor and we provided the services together with our partner Opt2vote. We are the UK’s largest independent supplier of information technology and business services with approximately 40,000 employees worldwide, of whom about 5,000 are based in the UK.

From our perspective, it was a very positive experience. Notwithstanding some of the issues that we had on the day, looking at the whole picture, we were very pleased with how the election went. We established a really good rapport with the Scottish Government, which was the holder of the contract, and we worked closely with the Scottish Government’s project team. We had a consistent facility in Edinburgh that we used all the way through the project, which provided lots of advantages. For instance, we were able to establish a permanent count centre there for the duration of the project, which allowed us to do lots more testing than we had planned. That was a very positive experience. We also established a really good rapport with the councils.

If a lesson needs to be learned, it is that engagement with the councils must happen earlier, notwithstanding the pressures that they are under. I understand those, but it would have been beneficial to have had that engagement earlier because it would have alleviated some of the problems that we faced towards the end of the project. We got over those problems, but they could have been dealt with a lot earlier.

I am the deputy returning officer in the City of Edinburgh Council, but I am here as the secretary of the Electoral Management Board for Scotland. The convener of the Electoral Management Board for Scotland is otherwise engaged with the Olympic torch at various points today, so it has fallen to me to take on this role.

The EMB is very much the practitioner of delivering the election and represents returning officers and the electoral registration officers across the country. The Scottish Government sets the legislative framework, the Electoral Commission makes sure that it is applied and we are responsible for getting out and putting the elections into practice with the support of Gordon Blair, William Pollock and the people whom they represent.

The EMB was brought into being by the Local Electoral Administration (Scotland) Act 2011, to which Andy O’Neill referred. The act also gave the co-ordinator of the board the general function of co-ordinating electoral activity in Scotland. Our role involves a number of things, but the board strongly sees its role as being to keep the interests of the voter at the centre of all electoral activity.

This time, the board was involved in a number of activities of which the key one was probably an early direction about the timing of the count. As you will be aware, the count for the election took place on the Friday—the day following the election—rather than overnight, as is traditional. We also provide a lot of guidance and information to returning officers—for example, about the adjudication of doubtful votes and how candidates and agents can be better informed about the count process so that they can play a better part in scrutinising the process.

From our point of view, the election was conducted well. We were satisfied that we were delivering a safe, transparent and open election in which the voters could have full confidence in the results, although we are open to other people’s comments about that. We are there only to apply the legislation and to deliver the elections as well as we can.

Thanks very much. That has given us a flavour of how people think the election went.

There are a few areas that committee members hope to have some discussion around. If witnesses and members indicate when they want to speak, I will try to accommodate everybody. However, we have limited time because of the other business on the agenda.

What is your view on the impact of decoupling the local government election and the Scottish Parliament election and the changes since 2007, particularly in terms of voter turnout?

There are a couple of issues to do with decoupling. There was an obvious impact on the May turnout figures because there was less publicity, given that the local government election was not riding on the back of the Scottish Parliament election. However, our concern was to ensure that the election process itself was well managed. That led to reduced confusion and allowed us to concentrate fully on the electronic counting system, which was a key element of the election.

How will the proposals in the UK Electoral Registration and Administration Bill affect Scotland?

The bulk of the provisions in the bill are reserved and affect the introduction of individual electoral registration, which will obviously affect voters in Scotland. Unfortunately, we do not have an electoral registration officer with us here today, but electoral registration officers have been working closely with the UK Government, and the Cabinet Office in particular, on implementation of the bill.

Do you want me to talk specifically about the LCM?

Yes. We will do that now and return to James Dornan’s question afterwards.

Electoral registration is a reserved matter, but the LCM is necessary because the conduct and application of local government elections is a matter for this Parliament. There are two or three issues in the LCM that we are introducing next week. In the transition between the system of electoral registration that we have now and individual electoral registration, voters who have not registered individually but remain on the previous register will be carried forward for a year or two. The aim of that is to address the concern among the Electoral Commission and others that while the introduction of the scheme is a good thing in itself, an unintended consequence could be a reduction in the number of people who register. There will be that rollover period.

The exception to that is that anyone applying to vote by post or by proxy will need to register as an individual, under the new legislation. Those issues could be dealt with by legislation in this Parliament, but as they are small issues in relation to the rest of the bill, and because there are implications and advantages in having the same arrangements for absent voting throughout Great Britain, we suggest that they be dealt with under the LCM.

The other issue that will be dealt with in the LCM is to give electoral registration officers powers so that after an election, when an absent vote has been rejected because the personal identifiers—for example the signature or date of birth—do not match, the electoral registration officer will be able to tell the voter what happened and give them a warning so that they do not make the same mistake next time.

Are there any more comments on the LCM?

The Electoral Commission has supported individual electoral registration since 2003, so we welcome the introduction of the bill in the UK Parliament. We believe that IER will give people the right to manage their own vote and that it will address some of the vulnerabilities of the electoral registration process. We recognise that it is a big change and that it needs to be planned well, and we have been working with the UK Government to try to achieve that.

A postal voter is not necessarily an absent voter. Are you saying that people will lose their postal votes if they do not reregister?

Yes. They will be given a warning and the opportunity to register. There will be a publicity campaign to encourage people to register.

To go back to James Dornan’s question, are there any other comments on decoupling?

When we took the legislation to decouple the elections through Parliament, it was the result of a recommendation in the Gould report in 2007, which had found that, among other things, holding Scottish Parliament elections and local elections on the same day using different voting systems contributed to confusion among voters. As a result, Gould recommended—and Parliament accepted unanimously—that the elections should be decoupled, which is what we did. The Government and Parliament at the time recognised that that could have implications for turnout.

However, we were looking at a trade-off between encouraging more people to vote in local elections and reducing confusion. The Scottish Parliament elections would have typically attracted a higher turnout than local authority elections. That is why there was lower turnout.

I agree about the decoupling. However, rather than the use of different voting systems on the same day, the major problem in 2007 was the Scottish Parliament ballot papers, which caused a huge amount of confusion. I am glad that they were changed.

I will speak about confusion over different electoral systems for different elections. Should we consider educating young folk at an early age in school about the different systems that we use, so that folk would know exactly what systems are being used, and when, and what the differences between those systems are? It seems that some of the current education is quite old-fashioned and does not talk about the various electoral systems that we use.

I agree. Any education of those who will eventually become voters will be more effective if it is started earlier. I am not an education expert, but I know that children and young people learn about various voting systems and arrangements in modern studies. It is about encouraging people to vote, and about people seeing at an early age the significance of voting. It is not just about different voting systems.

After that early education takes place, it may be an idea to allow young folk to vote at the earlier age of 16. Does anyone have any comments on that? There seems to be a point where folk lose interest—

I will stop you there, because you are moving into an area in which people might be uncomfortable expressing personal views.

No—I am not at all uncomfortable about that.

I am not talking about politicians. As politicians, we are very capable of expressing our views on contentious issues.

The AEA’s policy is to allow voting at 16.

There you go. Gordon Blair was hoping to come in on a previous issue.

I am a SOLAR representative, so I will leave the issue of votes for 16-year-olds to the politicians. I agree entirely with the point about education in schools. Some councils, including mine in West Lothian, have a communities team that visits schools and helps to run their pupil council elections using, for example, the single transferable vote. That gets pupils into the way of voting with numbers, rather than with crosses. There is a valid argument for improving education in schools, no matter when people start to vote in elections.

My personal observation over the past 18 months has been that there is a general ignorance—if that is the right word—of STV across all sections of the community, and not just among younger people. We ran a variety of demos during the course of the project and it was quite clear that many of the people who came to them did not understand STV.

On that point, we must accept that there is a wide ignorance of electoral systems, per se. People around this table might find electoral systems interesting—I certainly do, in the Electoral Commission—but other members of the electorate do not. Our research for the referendum on the alternative vote system versus the first-past-the-post system showed that very few people understand what first past the post is, although we have been using it for more than 100 years. Once we explained to them what first past the post is, they went “Oh! That’s what it’s called.” People are not aware of electoral systems.

I return to the original point. We supported the Gould recommendation to decouple, and we support long-term education on electoral systems. That is very important in Scotland, as we have four major electoral systems for the four major elections.

11:15

One of the things that we found when we did the public awareness campaign—this is anecdotal rather than firm evidence, because our external audits are still being done—was that when there is only one election it is possible to spend time explaining the 1-2-3-4 system, whereas in 2007, when people were having to put Xs and numbers on their ballot papers, it was difficult to get messages across.

We find that the closer to when the election takes place we can do public awareness work on how to fill in the ballot paper, the better. It is important to do the work when people are focused on voting, which is why we try to provide good voter information in the postal vote pack, in the leaflets that we send people near the time of the election and on polling booth posters. When people want the information, it should be there.

I echo that. It is not just young people who have trouble understanding or even being aware of voting systems, although there are innovative activities around the country that focus on young people; councils will be able to brief the committee on the details. For example, the City of Edinburgh Council undertook a lot of activity on Facebook this year, running competitions and trying to increase awareness of what was happening and how the election would work in practice.

It is essential to keep reminding people, right up to the time when they cast their vote, what they should be doing. The Electoral Management Board got polling station staff to say to people, “Remember, this time it’s numbers”, as they handed over the voting papers, so that voters had that firmly in mind when they went into the booth.

Has there been research into the impact of listing candidates in alphabetical order, particularly in relation to candidates from the same party? For example, if people wanted to give their first and second votes to Labour Party—or Scottish National Party—candidates, did they understand that they could choose between two candidates by putting a 2 first and then a 1? Did folk grasp what STV was about?

That takes us into the arguments about the use of alphabetical order or the Robson rotation. We have not done research on that. We are currently looking at rejection rates. Our provisional results show a rejection rate of 1.7 per cent, which is down from 1.8 per cent in 2007. That is good. Rejection rates varied from 0.55 per cent in Orkney to 2.79 per cent in Glasgow, and they varied even within council areas. In Dundee, where the convener is from, the rejection rate varied from 1.2 to 3.75 per cent. There are reasons for that. For example, election staff in Dundee told me about pockets where there are ethnic communities, where it might be necessary to provide more information in other languages. A job for the Electoral Commission and returning officers in the coming years is to analyse patches and to think about strategies to reduce the rejection rate.

We should bear it in mind that our rejection rates are comparable with those in Northern Ireland, which has been using STV for 40-odd years. In the Northern Ireland Assembly elections last year, the rejection rate was 1.8 per cent, and for local government elections the rejection rate was 2 per cent. However, one vote in which the voter has not expressed their preference is one vote too many.

Do we need to look at Robson rotation, to ensure that people express a genuine choice between individual candidates, particularly when there is more than one candidate from a party? I wonder whether sometimes people get elected because of their surname.

We host the Scottish Parliament political parties panel, which is attended by the chief officers of the parties in the Parliament. Most of the people on today’s witness panel attend, along with various other people, including someone from the Royal Mail. Two weeks ago, we had a post-election debrief. The issue was not raised at that but, when we were out observing in council areas across Scotland, we got feedback about anecdotal stories of people thinking that there were a lot of 1s for a certain candidate because their name was higher up the alphabet. Research by academics in the same field as John Curtice suggests that there are perhaps issues. However, because of the secrecy of the ballot, unless somebody does research and creates hall testing situations, it is difficult to evidence that.

As the first stage in putting together the regulations for this year’s election, the Government issued a consultation in, I think, the autumn of 2010, which went through a range of issues that could be covered in the regulations. The order of candidates, parties and groupings on the ballot paper was one of the issues. The response to the consultation document was very poor. From memory, 30 or 40 people responded and, among them, there was little consensus or appetite for change. Some people said that there ought to be a better way, but there was not a groundswell of opinion in favour of a certain approach. That is why we stuck with what we had for this year’s elections.

I have a question for David Anning. I am a supporter of Robson rotation; I think that it is a fair approach that means that people are not disadvantaged because of their surname. However, in practical terms, could you have managed a series of ballot papers in different orders?

Do you mean for a particular ward?

I mean that, for each ward, there would be multiple ballot papers.

That is a good question. I would have to give it some thought. Our e-counting system needs a predefined order in a particular ward. If there were to be different orders in one ward, that would be a substantial change. I would need to think about that.

Are there any other thoughts on that?

As has been said, one of the big issues was to get voters to vote using numbers and not crosses. My concern is that randomising the order of candidates might be more confusing to voters. We need research on that. It would be good to try to find out whether there is a detrimental effect on candidates who happen to be called Young rather than Anderson but, as someone said, one vote lost because of confusion is not good, so voter confusion also needs to be analysed through research.

The whole voting process needs to be considered. Like the convener, I am a great believer in Robson rotation. If the issue is not taken into consideration, I would like to be known in the next election as Adam Aitken or something like that.

In response to James Dornan’s initial question about decoupling, Chris Highcock was quick to say that his role was to ensure that the process worked. Everybody would agree that there was significant improvement from 2007, when we had all the pitfalls, and I am sure that there will be continuing improvement. Perhaps Robson rotation will be part of that process. However, even though the process has changed, as Stephen Sadler suggested, we still have the issue of trying to encourage more interest in local government elections. The evidence shows clearly that interest has not increased, particularly if we compare the turnout in 2007 to the turnout this year. Therefore, although we are getting the process right, we are not overcoming the apathy. Will we get to the stage at which we have to consider the Australian approach in which it is compulsory to vote and people are rewarded for voting or fined for not voting?

Are there any thoughts on that? Does nobody want to stand up for compulsory voting?

The only information that I have read or heard was in the Parliament in June 2010 during a seminar on voter turnout. Some members might have been at it. A Dr Johns from the University of Strathclyde gave a presentation with key messages on what affects turnout, on which he had obviously done some research and analysis. His finding was that people vote if they think that their vote will make a difference to the result and the result will make a difference. The key issue is about persuading people that voting matters, not about making voting easier. I do not know whether that is right or not, but it was Dr Johns’s message.

I would like there to be a lot more research into what makes people turn out to vote. I am talking about the electorate, not about people getting on to the electoral roll in the first place.

Dr Johns’s presentation was very interesting, and my personal view—the Society of Local Authority Lawyers and Administrators in Scotland has not addressed the point—is that we should be looking at ways in which it could be made easier for parties and candidates to engage the electorate through the electoral process. The Scottish Law Commission could look at that because it is a much wider issue. For example, candidates could use a 50 to 100-word blurb to advertise their candidature. The British Medical Association uses that method because it is a UK-wide body and the candidates for the general council are not known to members from the other end of the country.

The issue is to do with engaging the electorate. One feature that came out of our communities team was about engaging young voters through West Lothian College, which asked where the candidates were during the Scottish Parliament elections last year. There was no engagement, notwithstanding all the new technology that can be used. How can we make it easier for parties and candidates to engage with the electorate?

I want to come back to something that Stephen Sadler and Gordon Blair said that relates to the same issue. Only 40 people answered the consultation and none of them came up with any suggestions about how the system should be changed. There was also only limited engagement between the candidates and the public. Those facts seem to arise from the same source, which is a general apathy about voting and a particular apathy about council elections. Many members of the Scottish Parliament have been councillors and we know that the biggest impact on an ordinary person comes from the council. I do not think that we sell that message enough. There is a lot of work to be done there.

I would never use the word “ignorant” about anyone in the electorate, but not enough people feel passionately about voting in the first place, particularly in council elections, and we must sell the message that elections in general, and council elections in particular, are very important.

I have an anecdote from the local elections in North Lanarkshire. Again, I do not want to criticise the process that we are working with, but it is something to flag up. One candidate received the first vote overwhelmingly but was just below the margin to get him through. That guy ultimately came last so, although he had been overwhelmingly in front, he never got elected. We are talking about the public perception and whether people think that their votes count. Nine hundred people voted for that chap as their first preference but he never got elected.

I guess that that is a result of the single transferable vote system.

I know. It was just a wee anecdote.

It is a slightly different system.

I am interested in the role of the Electoral Management Board, how it has operated in practice and what difference it has made to the administration of an election.

11:30

I will take that on, although there are other people here who attend the Electoral Management Board as advisers or in the role of deputy returning officers. The Electoral Management Board was another element that came into being partly as a consequence of the elections in 2007. It arose from the Gould report and the subsequent legislation.

There was a perceived need for central co-ordination of electoral activity in Scotland, not to put rules in place but to ensure that the rules are applied consistently and effectively throughout the country and that there is a single point of contact for suppliers. That was a key element in the recent election, when we dealt with a major national supplier for the e-counting project. It is also about ensuring that the voter’s interest is paramount. We have spoken about the issues that arose in 2007 when, as Gould said, the voter was somewhat of “an afterthought”. The Electoral Management Board is always focused on ensuring that, whatever happens in elections, we think about what it means for the voter at the polling booth.

The board’s convener has the power of direction to require returning officers and electoral registration officers to apply the legislation in certain ways. However, the board’s view—and the way in which the electoral community in Scotland works—is very much that that sort of activity is best done by consensus in what is a relatively small community in which we support one another and achieve things by consensus.

A key element of what the board achieved this year was the direction on count timing. There was a stakeholder consultation and a lot of discussion about how the direction could best be framed and what the best timing for the count was, given the particular arrangements for electronic counting of the votes and the increasing number of postal votes. The question was what would be the best time for holding the count in the interests of the voter. That led to the only direction that came from the convener, which was issued in early February and was for the counting of the votes to start not earlier than 8 am on Friday 4 May.

As well as that piece of direction, there was work on developing guidance on how candidates and agents could be best informed about what was going on during the count, and there was guidance and training on the adjudication of doubtful papers. As we have heard, the STV system is not always understood and, even when it is understood, some issues still come up. For example, candidates can be well ahead on first preferences but, because they do not hit the quota and votes are then redistributed, we can get a confusing result. People need to understand why that happens, so we produce guidance on that to educate those who will be at the count.

Sample scripts for announcements were given out and material and templates were circulated to explain how to create the various post-election data. Electronic counting provides a depth of data on how people vote, right down to ballot box level. We needed to understand how that would be produced after the election, so guidance was provided for returning officers in that regard.

We also had two Electoral Management Board meetings with national suppliers, including Royal Mail and Logica, at which there were clear discussions with suppliers about the level of service that we expected from them. Again, the focus was not on doing something for the elections but on doing something for democracy and the voter. I think that that made a difference. Returning officers and deputy returning officers across the country said in various fora, such as SOLAR and Electoral Commission seminars, that it was a valuable experience and that there was consistency and clear understanding. It was clear that that message came from practitioners within the community and was not being fed down to them.

The Electoral Commission was instrumental in developing the idea of the Electoral Management Board through the publication of the 2008 report “Electoral administration in Scotland”. We have not concluded our discussions but, as a top line, the commission would say that the EMB is doing a good job but needs to develop further, although I think that it knows that. There are resource and capacity issues that need to be addressed by the Scottish and UK Governments.

Key for us is the duty on the EMB to co-ordinate matters, and the power of direction is just one of the large suite of tools that the board has to deliver a good product for the voter, the candidates and the agents.

Chris Highcock has set out the chronological detail of the EMB’s activity. We think that the provision of information in count centres for candidates and agents that it developed and encouraged returning officers to take up helped with transparency. However, it will be interesting to hear members’ views on that, given that they were all at the centres and that the move was designed to help them.

A subset of the EMB, the communications network, helped with a lot of public awareness initiatives around the country, and we supported its work. With regard to the direction on the timing of counts, the board consulted and tried to create the kind of consensus that the commission seeks to encourage for all elections and produced an answer well in advance of the event.

The EMB has been involved in various ways in e-counting. In 2008, when we came up with the idea for the EMB, we thought that it would be naturally centred for running an e-counting project on behalf of all 32 local authorities; we are still thinking about that but, as the board develops, it should take on that kind of role more and more while the Scottish Government lessens its own role in that respect.

An interesting thing that emerged post-event was that no one knew the national result—in other words, who got the most first preferences. There were phone calls over the weekend from people trying to find out and talk about stuff that was or was not on websites. E-counting can easily achieve that sort of thing if you think about it and put it all together beforehand. Producing the national result might be a role for the EMB, for us or for someone else, but we are definitely thinking about the issue.

As it develops, the EMB will have a big task and will therefore need resources and more capacity. The Scotland Act 2012 gives the Parliament secondary legislation powers over Scottish Parliament elections, but the question is whether the EMB will have the same role in those elections as it has in council elections.

Another event to look out for might happen in autumn 2014 when, under the draft referendum (Scotland) bill, the chief counting officer is likely to be the elections convener. That is another big agenda for the EMB to tackle. All in all, the board is doing well but will have to do more in future.

You asked whether the provision of information at the counts worked at the last election. I am probably not the best person to ask because in Dundee the system worked both last year and in 2007, but I certainly thought that information was available in an accessible form and that folk could see what was happening.

There were one or two wee blips in Glasgow but, to be fair, I thought that it ran pretty smoothly.

I have a question for Chris Highcock and David Anning. You say that the e-counting system is very efficient—and it certainly seemed to work very efficiently the day after polling day—but will we ever get to a point where, if a ballot box gets lost, some sort of alarm goes off immediately to make it clear that the result is wrong and ensure that we are not having to count the votes in that box at some later date?

I think that you are referring to the incident in Glasgow, which has been reported to Glasgow City Council. I am not familiar enough with the issue to go into it in any detail, but I believe that it was a combination of human and technical errors and I certainly think that there are lessons to learn in that respect. The system produces various reports when each box is dealt with, but I would have to look at the report on what happened in Glasgow to be able to say anything about those particular circumstances.

I accept that and, indeed, am not asking you to go into the specifics. However, is there not some sort of alarm that goes off when two sets of figures do not match up?

The system produces a verification report that says that a certain box should have a certain number of votes. If those votes are not all there, the system should flag that up.

Without getting into too much detail or inappropriate finger pointing, I must point out that it was failure of process—human failure, if you like. The system behaved as it was supposed to. Because of the way in which the human part of the process was carried out, the papers in that particular box were ignored, but the system itself worked correctly.

Would the system have recognised that there was something wrong?

Yes, the system did recognise that there was something wrong.

Somebody ignored it.

Exactly. There were reports available that would have highlighted it. In fact, when the report was scrutinised the following week, it identified that there had been a problem.

Andy O’Neill said that getting the national result was difficult, and it seems to have been a resource issue. However, there is a lot of detail in the stuff that the local authorities are getting, which can identify where the high and low turnouts have been and tell us how votes have been transferred even down to the level of single ballot boxes. What do you do with that information? Where we identify that some area has had a low turnout, do we investigate the reasons for that?

As returning officers and the election team, we would look at that only to see whether we got the number of polling stations right, for example. That is how we look at turnout. I suspect that it is the candidates and parties that would look at that to see whether they could improve turnout in their areas. It is not something that we would look at from the point of view of conducting the poll.

Do you not take into consideration that turnout might be due to the demographics of an area? Do you not take into account whether they are deprived areas or high-society areas? I know what you are saying about where people go to vote.

We would have a look at that in reviewing our awareness-raising publicity to see whether there were areas that we might want to target. We have not done that in the past although our communities team does that for other purposes. We could start to draw a correlation.

It is the local authority that selects the polling places that are to be used, and those are statutorily reviewed periodically. We operate within what we are told to operate within, but where there is a problem with a polling place we would feed that back in in the normal course of the review.

The Electoral Commission recommends to all returning officers that a survey be carried out on polling day by the polling staff regarding access, visibility and everything else. An instant report is also filled in. We get all those forms back at the end of the process and they feed into our local review. We do that in my local authority area, South Ayrshire, and I am sure that most other returning officers, although not all, will do the same.

The rejection rate was 1.7 per cent nationally and 2.79 per cent in Glasgow. Has there been a breakdown of whether the rejected votes were votes that were cast on the day or postal votes?

There is a distinction to be made. When we talk about rejection rates, we are talking about the ballot papers that have made it to the count. If postal votes are rejected on the basis of an absent vote identifier, a signature or a date of birth that does not match, those papers never make it to the count and are not counted in the rejection rate.

So the figure will be higher.

If we included the ballot papers that did not hit the count at all, the proportion of papers returned that did not count towards the final figures would be higher.

There will be a figure somewhere for the number of rejected postal votes that never made the count.

A separate percentage of rejected postal votes is available.

Thank you. My other question is about the impact of the count not going on overnight. Have you discussed the impact of starting the count the next morning rather than overnight?

11:45

The AEA and our practitioners certainly welcomed the direction from the convener of the EMB to have a next-day count. We thought that, from an operational and practical point of view, it made much more sense to count during the day than during the night. It is a long day for candidates, agents and party workers as well as for those who are running the election. The question of effective scrutiny arises, because we might ask how effectively someone can scrutinise things if they have been awake for 24 hours. There are other activities that people are not permitted to do if they have been awake for that length of time.

I realise that some candidates and politicians will have set views on the matter. At the close of poll, as usual, we waited for the ballot boxes to come in, undertook the required administrative checks and verification to ensure that all the figures balanced, and processed all the absent votes. In my local authority, it was well after 1 o’clock when we finished, and I believe that it was 2 o’clock or later in other places.

Throughout the country, we just had an early night, if I can put it that way, and started the count the next morning, at 8 o’clock in some places and 9 o’clock in others—those were the general start times.

On the postal vote rejection rate, we do not have all the data in yet, but we have a provisional rate of 4.4 per cent for Scotland as a whole. That is down from 5.9 per cent last year, so there has been an improvement. I stress that the figure is 4.4 per cent of postal votes, not of the electorate.

That leads us to consider how we can reduce that figure. We are all interested in doing that, but it is a big process issue. I think that it was Stephen Sadler who mentioned the Electoral Registration and Administration Bill. The bill contains a power that will enable electoral registration officers to write to people after the event and say, “Your vote didn’t get into the count because either your signature or date of birth was incorrect.” That will heighten awareness among people of the fact that their vote is not counting.

Postal vote identifiers last for five years and are refreshed only at the end of that period. There are lots of things that we can do—all of us as a community are looking at them—to make people aware that they have to get their signature and date of birth right. Certainly in Edinburgh, there were also issues around power of attorney. Many people think that, because they have power of attorney, they have power of attorney over someone’s franchise, but they do not. We need to get that message out to people.

There are also issues around matching. Where a couple in a house both have postal votes, they sometimes fill in the wrong forms and there is a mismatch. The returning officer will get their votes but will have to reject them because they are on the wrong forms. The power to allow a matching process will potentially get more votes into the count.

There is also a desire among returning officers for a power of discretion to allow postal votes into the count. That would be harder to achieve. I suppose that the analogy is with the adjudication of ballots. Under the current regulations, if someone is 86 but they put down a date of birth that brings them out as being 85, that is a clear failure and the vote will not be counted. We might think that the person has simply forgotten that they are 86, but it could be that someone else has filled in the form and voted for the person—we do not know.

The commission is going to commence a piece of work to come up with a balance between postal voting and security issues. There is certainly a big issue with rejected postal votes, or postal votes not getting into the count, which needs to be addressed.

Gordon Blair wants to comment. I ask him also to clarify one of the points that Andy O’Neill made. If somebody’s postal vote is rejected, are they told about that after the election?

They are not at present, as a general rule. One or two people might be doing informal approaches, but I think that that is the purpose of the clause in the bill.

So it is the new bill that will do that.

Yes.

I support Andy O’Neill’s point. The feeling in SOLAR and in other professional areas is that discretion for returning officers on mismatches is lacking at present. We would welcome a look to see whether the returning officers can be given some limited discretion. How that would be phrased in legislation is another problem, but it would reduce the rejection rate.

Before the current legislation was brought into force, the previous legislation allowed returning officers to match up mismatched documents. We could do that before we had the current system for fraud identification. Where there was no intention of fraud but merely ineptitude, that could be sorted out and both votes would be processed and counted. However, the system is now very strict and that discretion no longer exists, which is why provision for it has been included in the bill. The hope is that we can sort out a problem when it is clearly not fraudulent.

Do we mean that the votes would be counted and put in, then go to adjudication so that election agents and candidates would be able to see what the returning officer had suggested was okay? For example, a mismatch would go up on the screen for people to see.

The postal vote is in a separate envelope. That is, the ballot paper is in an envelope and it is a statement; once the statement falls to be rejected, that envelope is never opened. It is kept sealed for ever or, rather, until it is destroyed. The ballot paper cannot be included in the count, because the supporting documentation has fallen foul of the law.

The point that I am making is about what happens further to that. Would the election agents and candidates be able to give their opinion on the returning officer’s decision?

Yes. They are entitled to be present at the proceedings when we view the postal vote statements. If they objected to one of us accepting or rejecting a doubtful statement, they would have the opportunity to do that.

It is as William Pollock has explained, and the vote would then get into the count. If it needed adjudicated, it would just be another vote in the adjudication process.

I emphasise to the committee that postal votes are important to elections and election results. In elections over the past few years in Edinburgh, postal votes have made up over a quarter of the ballot papers that have hit the count, because of the differential turnout. We can have an overall turnout of perhaps 40 per cent, but a turnout of postal voters can be up at 70 or 80 per cent, and that turnout tends to hold up.

Huge numbers of the papers that get to the count are postal votes. I do not think that that is always recognised by politicians or the public.

We had a 15.2 per cent rate of postal voting for the most recent election, which represents an increase of 4 per cent over the past five years. Postal votes are very important.

I have a question about something that is probably not completely within the witnesses’ remit, but it is an issue that matters to me, so I am going to take the opportunity to ask about it.

When STV was brought in, it was suggested that it would improve the gender balance in councils. Is anybody aware of any research on whether that has been successful? We have had a couple of elections that have used STV. Do we think that it has worked regarding gender balance? If not, has it made things worse? Does anybody know?

That issue has not necessarily been a concern.

Is anybody aware of any research that has been done in that regard?

Just to follow that up, the introduction of STV was supposed to produce more candidates at elections. However, the evidence shows clearly that the number of candidates has fallen since STV was introduced. Would that not be taken into consideration?

Clearly, the choice of electoral systems is down to politicians.

I am trying to get beyond that. If there is an area of concern, where would you collectively raise that? Would you do it through different board members? I am concerned that we are getting the process right but not dealing with the real issue, which is trying to get people out to vote.

I have a specific point for Mr O’Neill about the Electoral Commission having a look at the limits of candidates’ campaign expenses for those campaigning under STV in large wards that include remote rural areas and islands. I can understand the reason for looking at the spending limits in that regard, but I wonder whether the Electoral Commission could also look at some of the inner-city seats where, for example, it is sometimes not so easy to get into blocks of flats that have no intercoms and where campaigning can cost a lot of money. If we are going to look at such difficulties in rural areas, we should also look at some of the inner-city difficulties in the same way.

Over many years as a candidate, I have loved dealing with flats in tower blocks with intercoms. However, in a particular ward in my constituency, it is often difficult to access some of the buildings because they have no intercoms and there is only one letterbox for the entire building. Basically, we must post or at least envelope everything that we put out, which means extra costs. Could you look at that aspect as well as looking at the difficulties in rural and island communities?

I am happy to do that.

Thanks very much, everybody. This has been the committee’s first look at how the elections went. I am sure that we will look at the area again in the future.

11:55 Meeting continued in private until 12:43.