I am delighted to support amendment 10. It would be disappointing if we judged whether or not it was valid on the basis of what happened during the previous Scottish Parliament elections. I am sure that many hon. Members in the Chamber can come up with a compendium of reasons why that count was a disaster. All political parties in this House have to accept some responsibility for the ballot paper, which has been identified as one source of the problem, because we all consented to it. We also put our faith, wrongly, in an IT system that did not work. We could perhaps accept that there is an excuse for its not working, given the complications involved in a Scottish Parliament election as a result of different votes being counted, different constituencies and so on, but that same IT system was tried out in a local council by-election in my constituency and it took us nearly five hours to get the result. The only good thing was that this occurred in the full presence and glow of the electoral commissioner with responsibility for Scotland, John McCormick, and his senior members of staff. They realised then, if they had not already done so, that that electronic system of counting was not yet usable for future elections.
It would therefore be unfortunate if we said that one of the reasons why we do not want overnight counts relates to that disastrous night, although the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart) is right to identify the number of ballots that were lost—people's votes that were lost. Ron Gould fell into the trap of stating that that was the reason why overnight counts were not wanted. He did not look beyond a particular set of circumstances on a particular evening when a series of issues arose that, in retrospect, could perhaps have been dealt with differently.
I have been astonished by the reaction of returning officers. For most of my political life, they have been able to deliver an overnight count without any great anxiety about whether or not staff had to work overnight, yet they have suddenly decided, in their wisdom, that they do not want to accept the responsibility of an overnight count. It came as a surprise to many of us before the last election that what we thought was a given—an overnight count—was no such thing. We then discovered that returning officers had it in their power to decide when they wanted to count an election for this or any other House. With the greatest respect to returning officers across Scotland, I do not think it should be their responsibility to decide when the count should take place. It is for this Parliament to decide when an election count should take place and I hope that the Government will consider the amendment seriously and will look at how they engage with returning officers, because, as we found out before last year's general election, custom and practice will not be good enough.
Scotland Bill
Proceeding contribution from
Anne McGuire
(Labour)
in the House of Commons on Monday, 7 March 2011.
It occurred during Debate on bills
and
Committee of the Whole House (HC) on Scotland Bill.
Type
Proceeding contribution
Reference
524 c672-3 
Session
2010-12
Chamber / Committee
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