Electoral Panorama / Panorama Electoral

The results of last Thursday's local elections in Scotland's two largest cities, Edinburgh and Glasgow, show that despite the introduction of a new proportional representation electoral system (STV), the number of rejected ballots was much smaller than for the Scottish Parliament election held the same day.

In Edinburgh, there were 2,483 spoiled votes out of 196,489 cast (1.3%), a figure far below the 10,394 invalid ballots in the city's six Scottish Parliament constituencies (one of which also includes part of the East Lothian council area).

In 2003, there were 1,015 rejected papers out of 179,348 votes cast (0.6%) for the local election in Scotland's capital, and 1,375 for the Scottish Parliament constituency vote.

The same phenomenon was in evidence in Glasgow, where rejected ballots made up just 4,505 of 192,881 votes cast in the local election, or 2.3% of the total, whereas in the Scottish Parliament poll there were 16,933 invalid ballots in the constituency vote for the Glasgow electoral region (which extends over the entire city and part of South Lanarkshire) and exactly 9,000 in the regional vote, out of 215,667 votes cast.