Scotland Bill

I know a little about that, as my son lives in Australia, which has a totally electronically registered electorate who all must register and vote. He travels a great deal all over Australia with his job and finds absolutely no difficulty in voting, because he can pop into any electoral office in any town at any time up to three weeks before a ballot and cast his vote for the area in which he lives, so it is a very sensible system. It is surprising that we have not caught up with the technology. It would certainly be a great advantage if we did, as that might engage people much more in the ballot. The idea that we had a problem because we counted overnight is wrong. Although those of us who soldiered on might not have been quite as excited by the process as my hon. Friend the hon. Member for Glasgow South West (Mr Davidson), it was clear to us that the muddle was created by there being two ballot papers. The other question relates to the training of returning officers, because I do not think that the returning officer I watched was competent enough to deal with the ballot, and some crazy errors occurred. For example, he did not tell a candidate who had lost in a council election going on at the same time that he had lost by one vote. The candidate did not discover that until the next day and so was not allowed a recount. Whether that was the result of incompetence, or just the fact that the returning officer was so fatigued that he wanted to get home to his bed and not have another recount in that crazy system running parallel to the Scottish election is another problem. The Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart) seemed to argue that at whichever level an election takes place—Scottish Parliament level or UK Parliament level—that level should have control over its own type of ballot. By that argument, local councils would be put in charge of their elections and allowed to decide all the things that have been argued for, including exactly who would be elected, how they would be elected and what the franchise would be. That is a nonsense. Presumably for Scottish Parliament elections it would be the First Minister who decides, certainly in the present Scottish Government, as only one person seems to make all the decisions in that Government. Those aspects must be determined by the level above that being elected. For example, the Scottish Parliament, quite correctly, controls the methodology for local elections, just as this sovereign Parliament, which set up the Scottish Parliament, should decide if it wishes to change that, possibly in negotiations. That is not saying that there is not a dialogue to be held, but the idea of putting it down does not make much sense. Therefore, I support the amendment. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Stirling said, the important point is that when people put their ballot papers in the ballot box, they expect it to be transported securely to the place where they are to be counted. One of the reasons why that was set up for UK elections was to let people know that ballot boxes are not stored somewhere else where they might be tampered with, so there is no split between the process of voting and the process of counting. To push that back to the next day is to add to people's cynicism about how elections are conducted and how the count comes out. It is clear to me that the lesson we should learn from 2007 is that we should not have two counts on the same evening. Therefore, we should not have the two processes of electing representatives and choosing the method of election at the same time. That argues strongly against the Government's proposal to have a referendum on a voting system on the same day as the Scottish elections, because that is asking people to postpone the count for the electoral amendment to the next day. It might be fine, because I think that it will be the great yawn of the century—I can just see people getting as excited as my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow North about exactly what little deviation in the electoral system they will be allowed in the process of choosing which system to use.