Poor ballot design led to spoilt votes

The 2007 election in Scotland was called a fiasco due to the high number of rejected ballot papers – at approximately 4% of all papers, this was the largest number of rejected ballots in UK electoral history; more than 146,000 votes were discounted. Why did the confusion arise?

Three elections were held on the same day, with two votes for the Scottish Parliament (made up of the first-past-the-post constituency elections and the regional lists); and one vote for local council elections. The two Scottish Parliament votes had previously been issued on two separate ballot papers; in 2007 they were combined on one ballot form. Although there had been warnings (following trials) that the new design of form would lead to confusion and a higher-than-average number of rejected votes, the design went ahead; some claim that the form was intentionally designed to be difficult to understand (which would favour certain political parties). To add to the potential for confusion, a separate ballot paper was issued for local council elections which were held on the same day; this had a different form of proportional representation to that used for the Scottish Government.

An inquiry led by Ron Gould, a former senior Canadian election official, claimed that voters were treated as an "afterthought" in the way the system was designed. Gould's report commented; "Changes were introduced with the expectation that they would simply fall into place."

Considering people have sacrificed their lives for democracy, surely it shouldn’t be beyond us to design a ballot paper that people find easy to use?