Oh dear. SNP MSP Christopher Harvie has found himself in a spot of bother for comments he has made about Lockerbie and the Scottish yoof.

On getting to Lockerbie, I discovered that the place is a dump - it was Tescotown. It should really have a certain attraction of a rather sombre kind as a place where something terrible happened; there are, after all, places on the western front and that sort of thing that have such an attraction for families who have lost people there.

There are a few things about this paragraph that are a bit off for me. I might be completely right to say that Lockerbie is a dump. I have never been, but frankly it wouldn’t surprise me. There are plenty of dumps around the place, and Lockerbie isn’t exactly known for its beautiful beaches or rolling hills.

Jeff is right when he says that if Lockerbie is a dump, Christopher Harvie should be able to say so. It should not be exempt from analysis because of the fact that it is the scene of the country’s worst terrorist atrocity.

But here is the thing. Christopher Harvie seems to be saying that Lockerbie should be positioning itself as a potential tourist attraction to help rake in the money from fans of disasters. As Mushkush implies, the idea leaves a slightly sour taste in the mouth.

Following that he turns his guns on the much maligned youth of the country. They cannot get a second of peace from the establishment’s whining about the yoof.

They are a demographic that literally cannot win. If they spend too long indoors playing their Xboxes they are criticised for not getting enough exercise and causing an “OBESITY EPIDEMIC“.

If they do the opposite and dare to go outside to get some fresh air and happen to commit the heinous crime of wearing warm clothing they get called names like “hoodie” and “yob”. And everyone points at them and says, “Why are you standing on the street corner? It is so intimidating.” As though just standing around is intimidating.

If they are not on the corner but are standing in the vicinity of a shop some ridiculous person comes along and installs a discriminatory device that is deliberately designed to cause youths pain. And people wonder why today’s young people are disaffected.

Anyway, Mr Harvie has added himself to the long list of poshy snooty types criticising yoof fashions. You know, fair enough on that front. Some people do wear horrendous clothing. But why is he attacking Tom Hunter for it? I thought the SNP were meant to be aligning themselves as a pro-business party. But Christopher Harvie’s comments are about as anti-business as it gets.

It must also be said that the most immense fortune that has been made in Scotland in the past few years - that of Tom Hunter - has arisen from selling people what must be the ugliest clothes worn by anyone on the entire continent.

Tom Hunter is one of Scotland’s most successful businessmen. If Mr Harvie’s theory is true, then Mr Hunter has done the country’s people a great service–selling people clothes that they want. He spotted a gap in the market. It is what great businessmen do best. It should be celebrated. But Christopher Harvie just looks down his nose at it.

There are also echoes of this anti-business sentiment with his dismissal of Lockerbie as “Tescotown”. It is the most successful business in Britain, which makes it the butt of ill thought out jibes like this. What does it even mean to be a Tescotown anyway? My town has a Tesco as well–does that mean I should just go and top myself now?

Anyway, back to fashion. What clothing would Christopher Harvie prefer people to wear? Knickerbockers. Goodness me. Apparently his personal preference is for plus fours. And look at that awful check jacket. Holyrood Watcher rightly takes him to task.

For me, this whole issue highlights a problem with the electoral system currently in use for Scottish Parliament elections.

Christopher Harvie was the SNP’s candidate where I live in Kirkcaldy. During the campaign he began to get a bit of a reputation as a “mad professor” among some locals. From today’s comments it looks as though he earned that reputation.

Even Brian Taylor has used slightly colourful language on his blog to call Mr Harvie ‘The Nutty Professor‘. And according to Kezia Dugdale, “Rumour has it the SNP were waiting for an episode like this but were surprised it has taken so long.” In addition to Christine Grahame, it looks like the SNP has its second major loose cannon.

Prior to Mr Harvie’s campaign, I was considering voting for the SNP as an anti-Labour tactical vote (not that it would have done much good anyway). But I did not want to vote for Christopher Harvie. He lost in Kirkcaldy. Yet, today he is an MSP. He got in through the back door on the list vote.

No-one voted for him to win his seat. People only voted for the SNP as a party–or Alex Salmond For First Minister, as they were known on the ballot papers. What a shock those voters will have got, thinking they were voting for Alex Salmond and instead getting Christopher Harvie!

The problem with the list system is that it gives voters the minimum amount of power possible. Voters have no control over the candidates. Positions on the are determined internally within the parties. This makes the MSPs accountable not to the voters, but to internal party structures. This allows too many poor candidates become MSPs and fills the Parliament with lackeys. The Scottish Parliament needs a heavy dose of Single Transferable Vote to weed out these people.

One last thing. I really don’t get this quote from Jackie Baillie on Christopher Harvie’s comments.

“He represents a supposedly pro-European party but displays the worst kind of euro-phobia.”

He singled out Scotland’s youths for criticism, and said they were the worst in Europe! How this is supposed to be a display of Euro-phobia beats me.

Unfortunately, this does not tie in with my theory about the inadequate list MSPs. I have to conclude that Dumbarton is one of Scotland’s many Labour rotten boroughs.

A few weeks ago I attended a talk by Eric Maskin, who this year was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory.

Eric Maskin seems to be quite an interesting person. He lives in a house that was once occupied by Albert Einstein. I imagine that would make a great pub quiz question. Perhaps even more startlingly, Eric Maskin dresses up as Albert Einstein at Halloween.

Professor Maskin came to Edinburgh en route to Sweden to talk about voting systems, a topic related to mechanism design.

Arrow’s impossibility theorem implies that no voting system is perfect at satisfying a number of desired criteria. These criteria are:

• The Pareto principle — if everyone prefers x to y then y should not be elected
• Anonymity — every voter should be treated equally
• Neutrality — every candidate should be treated equally
• Independence of irrelevant alternatives — the ability of x and y to win an election should not be affected by the entrance of a candidate z
• Transitivity — if x is preferred to y and y is preferred to z then x should be preferred to z

That fourth one is probably the one that grates with most proponents of electoral reform. We can reel off instances where independence of irrelevant alternatives has been violated. For instance, had Ralph Nader not run in 2001 then Al Gore would almost certainly have become President of the USA. A fragmented left in France allowed Jean Marie Le Pen to enter the final run-off with Jacques Chirac in 2002, when there was every chance that Lionel Jospin would have won such a face-off.

Interestingly, Eric Maskin thinks that if the SDP / Liberal alliance hadn’t run in 1983, Michael Foot’s Labour party would have won the general election. What a thought!

Just thinking about this sent me under a dark cloud. The design of institutions clearly has a disturbingly massive effect. The voting system is much more important than the voters themselves, particularly when you couple this thought with the paradox of voting.

The system that Eric Maskin concentrated on is Simple Majority Rule. This method has voters submitting rankings of candidates, just as in Single Transferable Vote. Then you take these rankings and use them to compare candidates in a head-to-head scenario, two candidates at a time. By comparing just two candidates at a time, you get rid of the problem with independence of irrelevant alternatives. If one candidate is preferred over another by >50% of the voters, he wins the election.

Well, almost. Unfortunately, this system is susceptible to Condorcet’s paradox. For instance, >50% of voters may prefer Labour to the Conservatives, >50% of voters may prefer the Conservatives to the Liberal Democrats and >50% of voters may prefer the Lib Dems to Labour. In other words, simple majority rule violates the transitivity principle.

The view of Eric Maskin is that to worry about transitivity is too pessimistic. For him, the Condorcet paradox is possible, but highly unlikely. This is because candidates can be lined up on a spectrum from left to right, and voters tend to vote in accordance with these positions.

As such, he suggests that simple majority rule is good as a least-worst voting system as it meets all of the desired criteria apart from transitivity which is unlikely to be violated. No other voting system works this well as often.

Of course, because the possibility of the Condorcet cycle even exists, there must be a tie-breaker. This is probably cause for a whole new debate in itself!

The talk provided some food for thought. For several years now I have been convinced that there needs to be a move away from the First Past the Post system. For the past few years I have been strongly in favour of Single Transferable Vote.

During the talk, one person in the audience specifically asked Eric Maskin about Single Transferable Vote. He said that STV can still violate independence of irrelevant alternatives, and pointed out that a similar system to STV was used in the 2002 French election.

I’m not entirely convinced that STV is all that similar to the run-off system used in French Presidential elections. The main problem with the French Presidential election (and the other examples that have been highlighted), as Proferssor Maskin pointed out, was the fact that voters were unable to rank candidates. Well, voters can rank candidates in STV.

Nevertheless, Condorcet cycle aside, I find the simple majority rule approach quite appealing. Yet we hear very little about it. If you are interested in electoral reform, I would say it is worth looking into a bit.

• Slides from Professor Maskin’s presentation (PDF file)
• An accessible article on this topic from the Scientific American (PDF) by Partha Dasgupta and Eric Maskin
• A more academic primer on the topic (PDF)
• More about Eric Maskin from Marginal Revolution
• Interview with Eric Maskin conducted by Adam Smith (heh). This interview does a really great job of outlining what mechanism design theory is and how it affects our everyday lives

Now that we are away from the hysterical, improvised reporting, I think we have a clearer picture of the problems that happened on Thursday night with the Scottish Elections.

The problems with e-counting were a minor problem. The pundits on television were really annoyed about it — but I think that was because they were unable to report a result. The bottom line is, the results are in and they are correct. We hope they are correct anyway — and there is no real suggestion that the e-counting machines were misreading votes.

All spoilt ballots were verified by a human, so any talk about recounts to take into account the spoilt ballots is nonsense. A spoilt ballot is a spoilt ballot. There’s not much else you can do about it.

There was e-counting, but there was no e-voting. Voting still took place with paper and pencil. The machines didn’t cause the spoilt ballots — they are two separate issues, despite some reports I’ve seen conflating the two issues.

Talking of conflating, it seems as though that is what caused the confusion among the electorate. Combining the two Scottish Parliament votes on the one paper was a massive mistake. Here is why.

Anybody talking about how “complicated” the Single Transferable Vote is, is a liar.

The reason was the introduction of “single transferable vote” for council elections. This high-minded proportional device was forced on Labour by the Scottish Lib-Dems as part of their price for joining the coalition government in 2003. It is designed to break Labour’s rusted-in grip on local government in the west of Scotland, and it requires the voters to mark a list of names with numbers in order of preference instead of with the old crosses. Used to voting in a hurry, scribbling an X on the way to or from work, the citizenry got muddled.

There is so much wrong with this paragraph. For a start, anyone who voted with an X on the council vote still had their vote counted as the equivalent of a 1. So it wasn’t these crosses that were the spoilt ballots.

Also, there were far fewer spoilt ballots in the council election than in the Scottish Parliament election. In fact, the Scottish Parliament ballot paper was five times more likely to have been spoilt by a voter.

Single Transferable Vote, far from being complicated, is actually — literally — as easy as 1, 2, 3. And the fact that there were relatively few spoilt ballots in the STV system proves this.

But now for the head-scratching bit. The system used for the Scottish Parliament has not changed, yet it has caused the most confusion. A popular theory gathering steam is that the layout and wording of the Scottish Parliament ballot paper was too ambiguous.

At the top it was headed, “You have two votes”. That is true, but they are two different kinds of votes — one constituency (first past the post), and one regional (d’Hondt top-up list).

The two columns were different colours — one purple, and one peach. And that sentence, “You have two votes”, had two arrows coming out of it, one pointing to each column. In addition, above each column was the instruction “Mark one box only”.

So, the instructions were all there, complete with colour coding for dummies. But still a lot of people got it wrong. I think it is fair to say that putting both votes on the one paper was a mistake. In addition to the fact that an STV election was happening at the same time, it is easy to see how some people might have become confused.

This whole mess could have been avoided with one simple measure. Put the Scottish Parliament votes on separate sheets like before. Each sheet should be headed “You have one vote on this sheet of paper”. That would probably have made the whole thing crystal clear.

This is all part of a wider issue about the voting system. The two votes were put on the same piece of paper to try and emphasise how they were inter-related.

It is often said that many voters believed that the regional vote (sometimes colloquially referred to as “the second vote”) was meant to be a second preference vote, which is not the case. To try and tackle the perception, the regional vote became “the first vote”, and took precedence on the left-hand side of the ballot paper. But this just seems to have confused voters even more.

Frankly, I find it astonishing that so many people lack basic understanding about the voting system. On the vox pops on television I’ve heard a lot of people bemoaning the lack of information about the changes made this year. But they were very well publicised.

The changes to local government have been well-known for years in advance. In fact, it was a central plank of the Lib Dems’ coalition deal with Labour four years ago. It was big news when it happened. Okay, that was four years ago. But anybody who was watching the news then will have been aware about it.

A leaflet came through my — and, I presume, everyone else’s — door explaining quite clearly how to vote. I’ve seen features about it on the internet and television. Even the political parties themselves, eager not to lose any votes on spoilt papers, were often keen to stress how the voting system worked on their leaflets. All of these were ignored by the voters who spoilt their papers.

A few weeks ago I mentioned this animation designed to explain the voting system. Ryan Morrison in the comments mentioned how patronising it is.

I’m a big fan of encouraging people to vote, it’s one of the most important things you’ll ever do and I also support the idea of lowering the voting age to 16 but surely this was aimed at seven year olds?

Even I don’t think seven year olds should have the vote!

Fair enough, most won’t have seen that website. But, apart from producing an animation aimed at people even younger than seven, I really don’t know what else the authorities were supposed to do to explain it.

For some people, you would probably have the pay the BBC somehow crowbar it into the plot of River City to get people to realise. Or get the barman at the Queen Vic to say, “Here, have you heard about this new voting system they are using this year?”

I am left to conclude that the people who didn’t understand what to do in the polling booth simply do not follow the news carefully. There is a debate at the moment as to whether or not it is fair to say that a lot of people who spoilt their ballots actually deserved to have their vote discounted.

Yes, everyone should have the vote — even the not-so-smart. And voting should not be a difficult process. But the point is, this isn’t a difficult process. It was probably more complicated than it needed to be, due to the reasons I’ve mentioned above. But the bottom line is that the instructions were reasonably clear and it wasn’t difficult.

Voting is a right. But it is also a responsibility. When you cast your vote, you are essentially imposing your decision on other people. I’m not surprised that some people are openly wondering about the ability of the electorate to make these decisions. After all, the electorate decides who is in government. I’d like to think that the people making this decision are not ignorant. Not necessarily intelligent, but at least not ignorant.

(Incidentally, proof if proof be need be that the electorate is stupid, I learned today that Labour’s regional vote actually went up in this election. What would Bentham say about that?)

Another problem which has been touched upon by a few people was the fact that names and slogans appeared on the party list. Infamously, the SNP was actually “Alex Salmond for First Minister” on the ballot paper. Solidarity was “Tommy Sheridan — Solidarity”. Other parties put slogans in their name (eg. “The Publican Party — Smoking in pubs”).

It is a tactic that can work. Like AA1 Double Glazing in the Yellow Pages, the SNP got to the top of the list by changing their name so that it began with A. It seems as though it worked, because they made massive gains in the regional vote.

Some are complaining that this caused confusion, that it brought campaigning into the polling booth where it shouldn’t be and that it has led people to believe that the regional vote is a vote for the First Minister. Maybe this should be looked at, but I don’t know how it can be stopped.

Should political parties have ‘official’ names that can only be changed, say, every ten years? A possibility, I guess. Otherwise, I don’t see how these practices can be stopped.

It will be interesting to see what the Electoral Commission’s report has to say about this whole debacle. But having thought a lot about it, I am fairly sure that keeping the two Scottish Parliament votes separate would probably have avoided it all.

And it couldn’t have been tighter. I’m still digesting this, but the only feasible coalition is SNP + Lib Dem + Green, and only by a bawhair.

Okay, here are my more in-depth thoughts. Firstly about the results themselves, then about the counting problems.

The bottom line is clearly the fact that the SNP have won the election. For the first time in fifty years, Labour are not the largest party in Scotland. In a sense, this isn’t a surprise. Even though Labour have always been electorally popular in Scotland, they have not always been in power. Now they have been for ten uninterrupted years. It was only natural that the main opposition would get in sometime, and they have.

The anti-Labour backlash wasn’t quite as large as I had hoped for, and the result really could not have been any closer. And exciting result in a way, and also quite an odd one. I think anyone expecting an independence referendum on the basis of this result had better not hold their breath.

Where I live, in Fife, Labour had a terrible night. Often they could expect to have Fife ringfenced, apart from that Lib Dem stronghold in North East Fife. But the SNP upsurge has seen a spectacular victory in Central Fife.

Meanwhile West Dunfermline has been taken by the Liberal Democrats, where they had that amazing Westminster by-election victory before. There were a lot of people who were disgruntled about the Lib Dem’s Westminster victory there, accusing them of hypocrisy over the Forth Road Bridge tolls. I think this cements once and for all how the actual voters feel about the Lib Dems in West Dunfermline.

In the other two Fife seats, Labour hang on, but with substantial swings towards the SNP. In these true monkey-in-a-red-rosette areas, hopefully the Labour candidates have been given a bit of a shock. The upshot is that out of the five Fife constituency seats, Labour now only have two of them where they would normally count on having four.

My over all impressions about the election, though, are that this was more about SNP gains than Labour losses. I’ve not studied the figures carefully, but during the night I got the impression that the Labour vote was actually holding solid — and indeed in some cases increasing — in a lot of areas.

The Lib Dems and the Conservatives were broadly unchanged in most areas. The SNP’s gains seem to mostly come from the collapse in the smaller parties. I noticed that many constituencies had only candidates from the four main parties, while last time round the SSP contested many areas. The absence of the SSP, combined with the general collapse of the left as a whole, seems to have contributed the most to the SNP’s upsurge.

What I cannot quite get my head around is the dire performance of all the minor parties. The problems with the SSP and Solidarity are understandable. They’ve spent the past year or so ripping chunks out of each other. Alister at Perspective has noted that a united left was credible, and greater than the sum of its parts. Last night was a disaster for both parties.

But what I really don’t understand is the collapse in support for small parties as a whole. It has been a distinguishing feature of the Scottish Parliament ever since the beginning — the variety of voices represented. Almost all of them have gone.

The Greens are down to just two seats, which is incredibly disappointing for them. I got the impression that they were hopeful of getting three MSPs in the Lothian region. So a massive shock for them, I think.

John Swinburne is also waving goodbye to Holyrood. I was impressed with his interview on BBC Scotland last night. He was very gracious in defeat, and he even said he thought the country was in good hands!

So, besides the Greens, there is only one person occupying the “other” box — Margo MacDonald. Socialism has been wiped out totally. No sign of any other different voices. Extraordinary.

Given all of this, I wonder if the SSP / Solidarity split has reflected badly on small parties as a whole. Perhaps the small parties have been hurt the most by this spoilt ballots problem. But over all, I’m scratching my head about that.

As I said above, I think a lot of the SNP’s upsurge is down to the poor performance of the small parties more than a collapse in Labour support. It is worth remembering that the SSP and Solidarity both support independence. It is very possible that, with a strong SNP campaign, a lot of these socialist supporters were tempted to vote SNP so that they could kick Labour out.

I think it was a good night for the Conservatives. They are down one seat overall, but they made a FPTP gain, which is good going for them. Remember, with the same constituency boundaries, the Tories were wiped out in 1997. Over the past decade, the Conservatives have been gaining FPTP seats back one-by-one.

And the Conservatives are also ahead of the Lib Dems over all. People always talk about the Conservatives being dead in Scotland. I’ve never bought that, and this result lays that myth to rest.

The Lib Dems are fourth, and it’s difficult to see much good news for them. Yes, a good result in West Dunfermline, where they were pushing hard for victory. But nothing too impressive elsewhere. And a huge swing away from Nicol Stephen in his own seat. A bit of a hairy one.

In a bit of amateur psephology on Twitter last night, I suggested that the SNP upsurge was happening across Scotland — apart from in the west. I was shocked when they didn’t win Cumbernauld and Kilsyth. It’s difficult to imagine how, with this great nationwide result for the SNP, how they lost that particular seat so spectacularly.

But then Nicola Sturgeon won Govan — at last. And then, as the list results came in, they won an astonishing four seats. The SNP performed quite well on the list in most regions. So it was a double-whammy, with the SNP doing well in both votes.

The exceptional region was, I think, Mid-Scotland and Fife, where Labour got three top-up seats. That is partly a reflection of the losses they made in Fife. In essence, the three constituency seats they lost were gained back in the top-up by default. Disappointments here for the Greens and the Lib Dems.

And the final over all result? Astonishingly close! And so close that it looks difficult for anyone to form a coalition. The only real feasible solution is SNP–Lib Dem–Green, but even that would have a majority of just one, which is not enough. Maybe Margo MacDonald could be brought on board, but it is still hairy. It could hinge partly on who becomes Presiding Officer.

Otherwise, Alex Salmond for First Minister? Almost certainly, as his party has the most seats. But it could effectively be a minority administration. Who knows, we might even have another election on our hands. What a thought!

Given all of the problems there were last night, there is probably not much appetite for another election. But a re-run would probably work okay. It wouldn’t be running at the same time as the local elections, and presumably (hopefully!) people are a bit more well-educated about how the voting system works.

The problems are causing a stink. I sympathise a bit with the idea that if you are too stupid to vote properly — and it’s not that complicated a system — then what right have you got to decide who runs the country?

On the other hand, there were a lot of things that could have been done to limit this. Most importantly, holding the local elections at the same time has undoubtedly been a huge mistake.

And just as bad a mistake was the decision to count those local election votes overnight. That could well have been what threw the e-counting systems into problems. If they had just conentrated on the Scottish Parliament overnight, it could have been okay.

There is no harm in waiting until the afternoon to start counting the local election results. Indeed, the way things turned out, that might have been quicker!

As for the e-counting systems, there were some rumblings about them in the run-up to the election, particularly from Fitaloon at MicroShaft. It looks a bit prescient now, but when I wrote the Scottish Roundup before polling ended, I wrote about it saying, “It would be a travesty if democracy failed this evening.” It did. So in that sense, these issues were entirely predictable, and predicted.

The e-counting systems were deemed necessary for the single transferable vote system and I can see why. As such, I don’t have a problem with the e-counting systems themselves. But what would have been the harm in just counting the Scottish Parliament votes by hand? That would have avoided this whole mess.

Electoral reform doom-mongers should be made aware that there is not a great deal to suggest that STV per se has caused the problems with spoilt papers. The number of spoilt papers in the local council elections has been much smaller than in the Scottish Parliament election.

That suggests that people understand STV well. But for whatever reason, they were thrown by the Scottish Parliament ballot paper. I admit to finding the huge list of parties rather overwhelming, though that should hardly lead to people filling in the form incorrectly.

One theory is that the ambiguous wording of the ballot paper, “You have TWO votes”, confused some people. Instead of putting one vote in each column, seemingly people have been putting two votes in one column. You still have to be thick as mince to manage to do that though. There are arrows pointing to each column, and it clearly says “mark ONE box only” above each column.

The biggest problem for me is that in Scotland we now have four different electoral systems for four different types of election:

• First Past the Post for Westminster
• Additional Member System (FPTP + D’Hondt-style top-up party lists) for Holyrood
• D’Hondt-style party list for European Parliament
• Single Transferable Vote for local councils

With so many different systems, it is no wonder some voters are getting confused, especially when two of them are being used on the same day. There are two answers — one radical, one not so radical.

The not so radical one is to simply hold local elections on a separate day. Tommy Sheridan made a number of good points talking on the television last night about it. There was undoubtedly some confusion, and the local elections were overshadowed and absorbed by the big national debate.

It would be sensible to simply hold different elections on different days. It might decrease turnout, but on the other hand if it means fewer spoilt ballots then more valid votes might be counted!

The more radical solution would be to stick to one voting system, namely single transferable vote. This is, on balance, the best system. The fact that there were actually relatively few spoilt ballots means that people have no bother understanding how to vote in an STV system.

The other systems are unfair for a variety of other reasons, but this post is long enough so I won’t go into them just now. No doubt long-time readers of this blog will be aware of what I think.

It would be a struggle to get all of the elections onto an STV system, particularly Westminster. But it would be nice, wouldn’t it?

As for who is to blame, obviously it is the Scotland Office because they are the ones who decided that the two elections should be held on the same day, and they are the ones who decided that the e-counting machines should be used. They have responsibility for the operation for the Scottish Parliament elections.

It is not a devolved matter, as the cowardly No. 10 statement claimed. Westminster has tried to pass the buck, but it is a Westminster department — Douglas Alexander’s Scotland Office — that is ultimately responsible.

Some people wonder what the Scotland Office is for these days. Obviously they are looking for stuff to do, so have been busybodying with this e-counting stuff. The e-counting systems might have been desirable for the local councils, but they did not need to be used for the Scottish Parliament elections.

As I’ve said on Twitter, this is becoming a strange election — more about the non-results than the results themselves.

It started off with bad weather thwarting helicopters in the Western Isles and a boat from Arran breaking down. Not to mention a madman with a golf club in Edinburgh, breaking open the ballot boxes and ripping up some ballot papers, which have subsequently been put back together with sellotape.

Now the electronic counting systems themselves are breaking down under the sheer weight of data being processed, including right here in Fife.

Then there were the masses of spoilt ballot papers. In some cases the number of spoilt ballots is in the thousands, and bigger than the majority.

I’m in two minds on this. On the one hand, if you are too stupid to understand how to use two different voting systems, do I really want you to have the vote? It’s not that difficult.

On the other hand, it is a little bit difficult. More than one person has suggested that the local government elections should have been held on a separate day to minimise the confusion, particularly with STV being a new voting system to Scottish voters.

Before going into the polling booth I knew exactly how both voting systems worked. But even I found it a bit overwhelming. Particularly with the size of the ballot papers, it was a bit off-putting trying to find the party I wanted to vote for on that huge regional section.

Questions will be asked about the number of spoiled ballot papers. Four different voting systems are now used in Scotland — a different one for each level of government. It was always bound to be confusing to some voters, and it has proved to be so.

It is way too much, and it has to be changed. At least holding different elections on different days would minimise the confusion. It might lower turnout. But at this rate, the number of vaild votes might increase.