Electoral registration

A small update on my earlier post on electoral registration - I've just recieved an answer to the I asked at the Finance and Audit Scrutiny Committee, and I can confirm that the election team in the Council have gone out to canvass 44,500 properties in the last year to chase people to register to vote. That's no mean feat, and despite the registration rate, they are trying their best.

Why should I vote for x?

Iain Dale's blog today links to a series of wee books by Biteback, of which the Lib Dem book is apparently selling best.

I hear they're interesting wee books, chock-full of arguments for the doorstep. Good for voters and activists alike!

I'd of course like to plug the SNP version - although oddly it's slightly dearer than the UK parties! I've had it suggested that's because it's just of greater value...

For the more cynical among you, there's a Why Vote? book to get you started.

I'll do a review once mine arrives!

Off the register

The news in the Herald and on Tom Harris' blog that more than 100,000 people in Glasgow aren't registered to vote didn't come as a great surprise to me. I know from canvassing various areas of Glasgow that you can go past as many doors as you knock on, as so many people are not on the electoral register. When you knock on the doors, you often find that the name you have on the canvass sheet doesn't match the person living there - sometimes the previous tenant has moved away some years ago.

We get regular reports at the Finance and Audit Scrutiny Committee on voter registration, and the details make glum reading. Despite all households being issued with a voter registration enquiry form, and being able to register by phone or online, many still choose not to do bother.

According to their records, the Council got the following returns:

300,002 Enquiry Forms issued on 1 August 2009
130,309 forms returned 43% return

169,693 First Reminders issued on 7 September 2009
46,152 forms returned 59% return

130,633 Second Reminders issued on 5 October 2009
42,540 returned 73% return

After the last tranche, the Council tries to visit or phone as many of the remaining people as possible. They run matches against asylum seekers, school pupils, death certificates, students, properties due for demolition, Housing Benefit Claimants, Council Tax, Registers of Scotland and seek help from the Glasgow City Council Black & Minority Ethnic Groups Directory. They've done roadshows and visited various groups. Evidently, it's still not enough.

There are many reasons why people don't register - lack of knowledge, lack of interest, or even deliberate disengagement. There are historical reasons - people who fear unpaid Poll Tax catching up on them - and factors like students only registering at home when they are also eligible to register in their place of residence. It's pretty staggering that this amounts to 100,000 people taking no part in the democracy that governs them or even voting for the Council who provides them with a service.

I suppose political parties are equally culpable for lack of people on the register. It's a apathetic circle: if people aren't on the register, we tend not to visit them. They then think politicians aren't interested in them, and continue to disengage.

If we find people by chance, and they're interested in registering, a form will be sent to them. Some people have genuinely overlooked registering despite the notifications, and appreciate it being drawn to their attention; I get the impression that they are a minority.

There's a lot of talk about people actively deciding not to vote - but active abstention still allows a minority of people to elect representatives. Some politicians would only care that they got elected, never mind the mandate, so active abstention will make no impact on them whatsoever.

Low turnouts merely cause people to wring their hands and say something must be done. They'll talk for a while about reform and debate the merits of compulsory voting. Then things will continue as usual.

Far better, in my view, to look at the candidates, track them down, speak to them, and find out which of them is a decent human being and would represent your views. Speak to your neighbours, family, friends at the pub about it. Staying at home and not voting changes absolutely nothing. Mass participation has the power to effect change.


If you're in Glasgow, and want to register, the forms are available online here: please do your bit, democracy needs you!

Euro Elections

The Euro Election Count at the SECC on Sunday evening was a bit of a strange experience, not least as I'm not used to such a time lag between election and result! There's a couple of phases of the count that people outside of the process might not know about, so I thought I'd give everyone a wee bit of a run-down of what actually happens at an election count.

I arrived at the count promptly at 5.30. The hall at the SECC was set up with separate areas for each Westminster constituency - despite the reality that this is the Euros and the result will be declared by local authority. It's useful for us as parties, as it gives us an indication of where we're doing well. Westminster is also the next election, so it's the most useful data we can get. For me as a Councillor, it makes things tricky. My ward is divided between three Westminster constituencies - Glasgow East, Central and North East - so I found it difficult to keep an eye on the ballot boxes from my ward at different ends of the hall!

It's important to watch the ballot boxes being opened for a couple of important reasons. You want to ensure that the boxes have arrived from the polling station sealed and untampered with until they are opened. You obseve that that there are no ballot papers left in the boxes. You check the box number, the polling district and the location, which are printed on the box. Oddly, ballot boxes are not a standard shape and size - when I was in Aberdeen, they were squat and square - Glasgow's are taller and look a bit like pedal bins.

The boxes are emptied onto a table with two or three counting officials, who begin the job of unfolding and piling up the ballot papers. The Euro ones are pretty big, and I saw a couple of them tear. This stage is important to political activists - we do ballot box sampling, which gives an indication of our support in each box. I was very pleasantly surprised by the level of SNP support in my ward. The ballot papers from each box are counted, totalled, and verified against the ballot papers issued. They then go to a central pile, and the process continues until all the ballot boxes have been counted. During this, we sample, we monitor, we ensure that the count is being carried out properly.

Following this, the process of separating the pile of papers from each ballot box into piles for each party begins. With so many parties on the ballot paper, this took quite a while. It's important at this stage to ensure that there are no stray SNP votes going missing into the piles of other parties. It sounds simple, but the vote counters get increasingly tired and mistakes can happen.

The piles are then collected into bundles of 100, and placed in a tray by party. It's really exciting to watch the votes literally pile up in front of you, but frustrating as you can't tell exactly how many are there.

Before the end, candidates and election agents get called over to go through the spoiled and invalid ballots. At the Glasgow count, there was enough room for hingers oan like me to peer over shoulders and have a look at these. Sometimes, people don't cast a vote. People make mistakes and vote twice. Some put their cross in an odd place which can be overlooked - for example, someone had circled a number next to one of the Green candidates, rather than crossing in the box. Since that was agreed among candidates and agents to be a clear preference, the vote was counted. What was striking was the number and the manner in which ballots were spoiled; I'm sure the number of deliberately spoiled ballots have increased. A good number of people had written things like "none worthy of my vote", "general election now", "corrupt". It's a clear message, and one no politician should ignore.

After this, all that remained was the declaration, and it was a long time coming! The result for the whole city was declared, and the constituencies distributed. They're now up on the the Glasgow City Council website if you fancy a bit more information. I was really pleased to see how close Glasgow Central had run (very tight, as you can see from the final picture!), delighted about Glasgow South and Glasgow North, and a little disappointed by the rest. It's a huge difference however from previous elections in Glasgow. The majorities for Westminster were eye-watering, but they vanished in the course of this election. This is more than just protest votes; people are switching, and when people switch, it changes the way they think about voting in every election after.

I'm delighted by the overall result for Scotland - as the Herald said this morning, this was no fluke.

Five years ago the SNP polled 231,505 votes in this election. This time round the figure was 321,007. For Labour to imagine that this was achieved simply by their own vote staying at home, or that switchers came only from the ranks of Tories and Liberal Democrats using the SNP as a protest vote, seemed fanciful.

Some voters still don't get STV

I've been meaning to blog on this since the night of the Baillieston count, but found myself with far too many other important things to catch up on! Anyway, what better way to spend my first Saturday off in months that musing on electoral processes...

Glasgow City Council seems keen to pursue e-counting, partly as Glasgow didn't have the massive problems experienced at other counts in Scotland on the 3rd and 4th of May 2007. E-counting is actually quite an interesting process, and gives incredibly detailed results showing transfers and stages of election (follow the link at the bottom of the page). As interesting as some of us find these details, the basics of Single Transferable Vote are still lost on a significant number of people.

The voters of Baillieston are the most experienced STV voters in Scotland, having now been through the 2007 election and two by elections. Despite this, my experience at the count at the most recent by election demonstrated to me that electors appear to remain unsure of how to cast their vote in an STV election.

The process at e-count works something like this. Votes arrive in their boxes from the polling station, and are first fed through scanners and checked to ensure the number of ballots in the box matches what ought to be there.

Questionable marks on the ballot paper are then examined on a screen like this (Key Correction). At all stages, computer monitors are positioned back to back so counting agents are able to see exactly what the clerk sees and chip in with their thoughts (a 1? a 4? a squiggle? an arrow? too faint to see?). Numbers are either confirmed or sent through to the next stage where the mark can be seen in context.

At this next stage (Standard Queue), ballot papers are shown in their entirety so questionable marks can be better understood. As you can see from this picture, what would have looked like a faint line on the previous screen is quite clearly a 1.

It's also at this stage where voters' uncertainty about the STV vote becomes obvious.

Lots of voters are still marking their preference with a cross, instead of ranking. This still counts, but means that their vote is only good for one candidate and one stage of the STV count process.

A good number of voters appear to have put crosses next to more than one candidate. This makes it impossible to tell which candidate or party they prefer, so their vote has to be discarded.

Some people also do things like put a 5 next to the fifth candidate; I think the guidelines could be revised to include this vote, as it's the only preference shown.

Any ballot papers still in question (particularly ones with faint marks) are then sent to the Returning Officer's queue, where representatives from all the parties haggle over what exactly the voter meant when they put that smudgy squiggle near a candidate's name.

I am concerned that there is still a lot of confusion and a lack of understanding in the electorate. The Electoral Commission's report highlighted the problems of 2007 - strikingly, most of the 38,351 local government votes rejected last year were due to over-voting or uncertainty. Less than two hundred were rejected due to the lack of an official mark or being able to identify the voter.

In Baillieston 290 votes were rejected in 2007 out of a total of 10,666. Confusion persists. 65 ballot papers were rejected out of a total of 5261 cast in the first Bailieston by election, and 57 out of 4876 in the most recent by election. What if these votes were some of the same people making the same mistake? You could argue that it's natural selection, electoral style but I don't believe that it's acceptable that any vote gets cast aside. All parties work very hard to get voters out to the polls; it's not easy to pursuade people to come out on a cold dark night to take part in the democratic process. Authorities and parties must do more to make sure that every vote cast in good faith counts.

Election week - election number one

I'm getting increasingly excited about the US Presidential Elections. I love elections; I even started getting into the re-runs on BBC Parliament, but after staying up all night for the disaster that was the 2000 US vote I kind of lost interest in what goes on across the pond. This time, for so many reasons, it's different. Watching the constant coverage is also making my head run off in dozens of different ways.

Can Obama really pull it off? Will there be an earthquake in American politics? Will change really happen?

I was incredibly pleased to see the queues of people waiting patiently to vote, even in the days running up to the election. Good for them. I stood waiting to engage with voters at a polling station in Glasgow East for hours as a trickle of people came in; the ones who came were determined, but they were few. I love the "vote and bring a friend" thing too, though clearly, bringing a like-minded friend is important!

I was fascinated by the stories on the BBC liveblog of the voting confusion. Fair enough, there was confusion at the Scottish Parliament and Council elections last year, but the principle of how you vote here is fairly simple - how did the USA manage to make things so complicated? Punch ballots, computerised voting, and things like the returning officer equivalent leaving ballot papers in her car. We seem to have this election thing running fairly well - what's wrong with putting a mark in a box on a bit of paper?

I'm hoping to stay up all night to watch the results come in. Then I'll go and campaign in Glenrothes!

SNP backs Votes at 16!

Really pleased that the resolution that we in Young Scots for Independence put forward to SNP Conference got passed by acclaim today - with the endorsement of SNP conference legend Gerry Fisher no less.

YSI Organiser David Linden proposed the resolution with his maiden speech to conference, seconded by Bailie David McDonald. They both spoke very well, highlighting the unjustness of taxation without representation, and even got on the BBC's conference coverage. I'm very proud of both of them.