Yarbles...!!!
Posted on 05/10/2007 6:09:52 PM PDT by SJackson
EDINBURGH -- The headline in the Edinburgh Evening News from the day after Scotland's highest-profile election in 300 years announced in bold letters: "What a fiasco!"
The Edinburgh Evening Times shouted: "Shambles!"
It was all they could say, really, as the passage of the better part of a day after the polls in last Thursday's election had closed did not produce a final result for the papers to report.
There were more questions than answers. As an official election observer who happens to have authored a book on America's most troubled election, I found myself in the position of offering an accurate if unsettling explanation for the troubles.
Commenting for the BBC and the Evening News, as well as a number of other broadcast and print outlets, I explained that Scotland was experiencing "a Florida."
While the 2000 presidential election in the United States was left unsettled because of bad decisions and bad faith on the part of officials in the Sunshine State -- before finally being settled wrong by the U.S. Supreme Court -- it appears to have been merely a bad decision that made it difficult for the Scots to figure out who would control the nation's parliament.
But the bad decision in Scotland in 2007 was eerily familiar for those of us who covered the Florida fiasco in 2000.
Scottish election officials set up a ballot that was confusing -- it said "vote for two" when it should have said "vote once in each of two separate columns" -- and more than 100,000 Scots spoiled their ballots. In a close election between forces seeking to maintain Scotland's three-centuries-old link to the United Kingdom and those who hope, as street graffiti declares, to "End London Rule," the difficulty of reviewing all the ruined ballots slowed counting to a standstill.
Even in the slow count, it was clear from the start that the Scottish Nationalist Party, which proposes independence, had posted its strongest showing in a history of rabble-rousing that goes back to pre-World War II days.
But it might even have been stronger -- and the finishes of Scotland's robust Green and socialist parties would certainly have been better -- if the close to 10 percent of ballots that were wrongly marked had been countable.
The tragedy of the bungled ballot is that the Scots have been in the forefront of promoting innovative electoral reforms, most of which have worked well. For instance, in local council elections last week, Scotland implemented a Single Transferable Vote (STV) system that allows voters to rank the names of candidates on a list so that, if their first choices are not elected, their votes can be transferred to a second, third or fourth choice.
The STV system, which is easily learned, does not appear to have caused much trouble. And it definitely produced more democratic results in races for council seats across Scotland.
The trouble came in the parliamentary voting, where that failure to use two separate ballots caused confusion and disenfranchisement.
To their credit, the Scots have for the most part responded appropriately. Instead of jockeying for position, as politicians did in Florida in 2000, Scottish political leaders objected, loudly, to that disenfranchisement.
"Tens of thousands of votes across Scotland have been discounted," declared Alex Salmond, the leader of the SNP in his first major address to the nation after the election. "That is totally unacceptable in a democratic country."
Added Annabel Goldie, the leader of the Scottish Conservative Party, "In some seats the number of spoiled ballots has increased tenfold. It is quite simply unacceptable that tens of thousands of voters have been effectively disenfranchised."
Before the initial count was complete, officials had already pledged to pursue an "urgent investigation" into all the causes of the crisis.
Scotland is serious about democracy. It will sort its problems out quickly. Indeed, if American leaders were as urgent as the Scots, we might well have dealt with the lingering uncertainty about the legitimacy of our democratic processes.
As it is, we continue to await our urgent inquiry into the messes in Florida in 2000, in Ohio in 2004 and in too many other states. Thus, while I certainly could commiserate with the Scots, I could not tell them that we know -- or do -- better.
Since this writer lies his head off about the Florida election, there’s no reason to believe anything he says about the Scottish election.
Stopped reading here. Grow up, people.
If the APA would come up with a diagnosis for this, electorial dementia perhaps, maybe insurance would pay for treatment.
It's called natural selection. If you're too stupid to figure out the ballot, you shouldn't be voting.
No they can't let it go. They can't believe that "those idiots" could possibly reject them.
Yarbles...!!!
Unfortunately, even well-educated people were stumped by this ballot.
It appears that some blame must go to the geniuses who dreamed it up.
Are we to believe that the parties had nothing to do with the ballot design?
Were they not given proof copies for their review and approval?
Just as the Democrat party officials in Palm Beach country reviewed and approved their infamous "butterfly ballot", you can bet that Ms. Goldie and/or her party signed off on the ballot design.
Now, they are doing what politicians do best: Blaming others.
May well be. It still applies to Florida, though.
Editorial page or editorial pretending to be a news story?
Ediorial. They go on like this every day.
Ediotorial. There, fixed it. You may have coined a new word.
Would the Capital Times have even bothered to notice a Scottish election if they couldn't have gotten that last line in?
With a Madtown rag, I did wonder. I almost expected it to have been a “news” item, because I’ve seen how deranged the left has become.
It seems to me that I’ve read some other garbage written by this doofus before. I’ve been to the red city more than a few times.
Republicans control the ballots in Scotland, too??
Especially since all those “old media” people showed up in FL one year after the 2000 election and totally recounted the whole state. They even paid lots of bucks to do it. It was all legal and everything.
GUESS WHAT .. BUSH STILL WON!!! GORE NEVER WON!!!!!
SOMEBODY TELL SCOTLAND THAT!!
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