Vote officers 'warned executive'

There are fears of more than 100,000 spoilt ballot papers

A returning officer has said the Scottish Executive was warned that the counting process should have been delayed to try to avoid mistakes.

The elections have been hit by major problems, with fears of more than 100,000 spoilt ballot papers.

Alan Campbell, responsible for the Aberdeenshire constituencies, said returning officers recommended a Friday morning start but it was rejected.

The Electoral Commission said it will investigate in the coming weeks.

Our advice was rejected. People have done their best, but clearly this is a new system and there will be occasional glitches Alan Campbell Aberdeenshire returning officer

Mr Campbell said: "I think it's very clear that all the returning officers in Scotland did recommend to Scottish ministers that we in fact start this whole count process on Friday morning rather than on Thursday evening.

"If you think about it, it makes a lot of sense really to give everyone a full night's sleep, to give time for the rural areas to gather the ballot boxes in and then start first thing on Friday morning.

"Our advice was rejected. We went along with it. People have done their best, but clearly this is a new system and there will be occasional glitches."

He said: "Staff have not worked on this before. We had a very big team on, but it is a big, big undertaking. I believe if you start first thing in the morning, it's a different perspective altogether.

"We have done that on other occasions. We've done it on European counts, when counting doesn't take place till after voting closes in the rest of Europe and I believe it's a more sensible way of doing it.

"And I had hoped with the advent of electronic counting, we'd actually begin to do things a different way. You've got to appreciate that many parts of Scotland are rural and it takes a long time to get the ballot boxes to a central location."

Counts suspended

He said of the Scottish Executive: "I think they were keen to have results declared, particularly for the parliamentary wards, keen to have them declared overnight, which has been the tradition.

"But if you couple that with the new system and with the need to carry out the counting on the council wards at the same time, because we were very much encouraged to do them both at the same time, it was just really probably too much."

Voters were presented with two ballot papers and two voting systems - one for the Holyrood elections and the other for local authority elections - the latter under the new Single Transferable Vote system.

From the first results there was evidence of a huge number of spoilt papers, with suspicion falling on arrangements which may have confused many voters.

The counts in Aberdeen, Argyll and Bute, Edinburgh, Eastwood, Perth and Tayside North and Strathkelvin and Bearsden were suspended until later on Friday.