Ballots, bollocks and balls-ups

BBC Radio Scotland is this morning claiming that 142,000 papers were spoilt on Thursday. It's a huge figure. It's also blatantly disingenuous; an exercise in double counting.

There were, as we all know, two ballots on one form - one physical piece of paper. But 142,000 pieces of paper were not spoilt, because the number 142,000 counts spoilt votes in the two ballots separately.

According to the reporter, 'about one third' of the spoilt papers had two marks in one column, and 'about two thirds' were blank.

If this is so, then there were something like 47,000 papers which had two crosses in one column and the other column blank, and those papers did indeed spoil both ballots (but it's still only 47,000 papers not 94,000). Again, if the BBC estimates about the patterns of spoiling are correct, another 23,000 papers were entirely blank, representing 47,000 ballots.

These aren't spoilt, they are abstentions. They should be subtracted from the turnout, not added to the spoilt papers

When you went into the polling station you were handed two papers, one for the council election, one for the parliament. A voter who wanted to vote for local councillors but did not want to vote for MSPs would naturally leave the parliament paper blank. The figure of 23,000 sounds large, but amounts to 315 electors per parliamentary constituency, which is not at all a surprising figure.

So unless this 'about two thirds blank' estimate from the BBC is wrong, the true number of spoiled papers - based on the BBC's own figures - is less than 50,000.