A row has broken out following Scotland’s first council by-election since the introduction of STV after the Returning Officer decided four votes was not a small enough margin to warrant a recount.
The Aberdeen City Council seat was won by the SNP, but at one stage there were only four votes separating the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives and analysis of the ballot papers shows that had the Liberal Democrats overtaken the Conservatives (rather than being eliminated) they would have gone on to win the seat.
“The Liberal Democrats were four votes away from a sensational by-election gain. We will be raising questions with the Returning Officer and with the Electoral Commission about the refusal to hold a recount. It is a poor result for Labour who had previously won a seat here but came fourth,” said Alison McInnes MSP.
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5 Comments
I know we love them, but why even hold a by-election under STV?
BM, I don’t really understand your point. Do you mean it’s not worth having by-elections? In which case the incumbent party appoints a replacement? That would stop changes in balance on local councils and doesn’t seem very democratic.
Or do you mean you want another different election system !! Part of the problem in Scotland now is having different systems going back to a first past the post system would not help as well as undermining the move to PR in local elections.
This outcome for this by-election seems very odd at first glance but may be due to a hangover in the rules / interpretation by the ERO, who seems to have thought that the Lib Dems had no case to ask for a recount as they were third not second. A principle they used to apply under FPTP.
Clearly different dynamics operate in STV (or in this case AV) elections and the rules and / or the ERO may need updating.
The point is that under STV you can simply count back the original ballots to fill a vacancy.
RE3: Yes you could do that, but it could be viewed as undemocratic.
The by-election was held under AV i.e. STV for one vacancy.
The Scottish rules state the right of the candidate’s agent to ask for a re-count and the right of the returning officer to refuse. They don’t state the circumsances under which a request must be granted or refused. (Basically, it’s up to the returning officer to decide whther confidence in the result, for example, would be undermined if he didn’t grant the request.)
The Northern Ireland rules are less ambiguous, and state that a re-count can only be requested stage-by-stage. This is the only precedent that exists in the UK for such a situation, because of having used electronic counting at the 3 May elections.
At stage 4, with three candidates left in, there was a four-vote margin between the second and third placed candidates – the Tory and the Lib Dem (SNP were in first place). Normal agents’ practice in such a situation, with such a small margin, would obviously be be to ask for a re-count. The DRO anticipated this, and announced without being asked that he would re-count stage 4.
The Lib Dems, however, wanted a re-count from stage one, so that the Tory and SNP first preferences would also be re-examined.
However, because all the agents had agreed they were happy with the result at all the preceeding stages, the DRO refused to re-count anything except stage four.
So not to do with the LDs being third, just to do with how the rules were interpreted. This is the first time those rules had been applied for a by-election, and they were written with an electronic count in mind, so the sticking point is that this manual count had, as in Northern Ireland, the results being announced at each stage, and, crucially, the agents agreeing those results at each stage.
As regards counting back the orginal ballots, that might seem like an attractive option 2 months after the election, but it wouldn’t look so good in three years time when the losing candidates have all got themselves selected for other seats and the electorate has changed its mind about who it wants to see elected!