Bid to separate future elections

Ballot papers were scanned by vote-counting machines in the May polls

The Scottish Government has launched a bid to separate future Holyrood elections from council ballots, the parliament minister has said.

Bruce Crawford said a consultation paper would be published on the best way of "decoupling" the two polls.

Next week, the government will also publish a response to the Gould report into the Holyrood election fiasco.

About 146,000 votes in last May's Holyrood ballot were rejected, along with 38,352 papers in the council poll.

A report by international elections expert Ron Gould into the elections found that voters were treated as an "afterthought".

First Minister Alex Salmond has already said his administration accepted in full the recommendations of the report - which included having Holyrood and council elections on separate days, preferably about two years apart.

Mr Crawford warned that if the election system did not undergo "fundamental change" there was the risk that last May's fiasco would be repeated.

He also restated SNP demands for Holyrood to be given responsibility for Scottish Parliament elections.

Mr Crawford said the government has to act swiftly

"We believe - as does the parliament - that the key step would be for the further devolution of executive and legislative powers to the Scottish Government and the Scottish Parliament for the conduct of its own elections," he said.

"The Scotland Office and UK Government have failed to recognise that parties across the Scottish Parliament supported the transfer of executive and legislative competence to our parliament.

"Anything short of fundamental change to the running of our elections risks the very real prospect of similar problems in future years."

He said the Scottish Government agreed with Gould's recommendation that the ballots be held on different dates to help ensure that local government is considered separately from central government issues.

"But we also need to agree on how exactly we do that and the Scottish Government encourages everyone with a view on this to make them known through the consultation starting next week," he added.

"If we are to change our election system in the way we believe it needs to be changed, we need to move swiftly."

Legislative competence

Mr Crawford urged politicians from opposing parties to put their differences aside and "work together to rebuild the public's trust in our voting system".

"This issue is beyond politics," he said.

Scottish Tory MSP Gavin Brown said: "Four years ago the Scottish Conservatives launched a bill and a consultation to decouple the local and Holyrood elections.

"We feared that holding the polls on the same day was a recipe for disaster. Sadly we were proved right."

Minister of State at the Scotland Office David Cairns said: "Both Labour and the Conservatives have made it clear that they do not want to devolve legislative competence for the elections.

"This move also only has the support of 8% of the Scottish people in a recent poll, which clearly identified that the main way to avoid future problems is to hold the Scottish Parliament and council elections on different days."