Britain:An urgent investigation began in Scotland yesterday after one of the most closely fought and eagerly awaited elections of recent times descended into chaos and recrimination over problems with the casting and counting of votes.
The political parties had been poised for a final result in the Holyrood (Scottish parliament) elections to emerge yesterday morning, but instead it was delayed until late afternoon after counts in seven centres were paralysed by "serious technical failures" with new electronic counting machines.
The picture became more chaotic when it emerged that as many as 100,000 ballot papers were inadvertently spoiled by voters making errors on redesigned voting documents and tens of thousands of postal votes were delayed or went missing.
In Edinburgh Central, Labour's deputy environment minister, Sarah Boyack, held her seat with a majority of 1,193, but there were 1,501 rejected papers. In Glasgow Baillieston, the rejected total of 1,850 was more than 10 per cent of the votes accepted, and most constituencies saw at least 1,000 papers rejected - 10 times the norm.
The shambolic scenes, exacerbated by a parallel controversy over missing postal ballots, put e Scottish secretary Douglas Alexander under intense pressure to explain why he had ignored warnings that the new system could lead to problems.
Mr Alexander was quick to welcome a decision by the electoral commission to order an "urgent investigation" into all three issues and he requested an immediate postmortem by the machines' supplier, DRS.
Douglas Bain, chief electoral officer for Northern Ireland, said he would now delay introducing e-counting in the province after watching the chaos unfold around Scotland.
"Patently, everything has not worked well in Scotland and the public perception is that there was a cock-up with electronic counting," he said. " I do not think I can risk moving in that direction until the counting system is tried and tested.
David Mundell, opposition Conservative spokesman on Scottish affairs, said it had been an error for the Scottish executive and Scotland Office to stage Holyrood and council elections the same day, using "untried and new technology" and different voting systems.
Seven counts were suspended until noon yesterday because of problems with ballot scanning machines, which cost £4.3 million (€6.3 million).
At the last Scottish elections in 2003, voters were given two ballot papers - one for their constituency seat and a second for regional list seats. On Thursday, both votes were put on one form, and thousands of voters appear to have misread the instructions and put both crosses on the first half of the form, for a regional list.
To make matters worse, the count for Western Isles (off the west coast) was delayed until yesterday morning after fog in Inverness prevented take-off by a helicopter which had been due to fly ballot papers from the Western Isles.
- (Guardian service)