Electoral recount in Glasgow
There have been a surprisingly small number of articles about the recount taking place for the council elections in one ward in Glasgow. The media coverage has been poor with bloggers picking up the slack.
See for example the commentary by Lallands Peat Worrier
Well, lets look at the story by the BBC
The result of a Glasgow council ward could be in doubt after it emerged that a ballot box was not counted during last week’s local government elections.
…
BBC Scotland understands that the Langside ward ballot box was wrongly verified as containing no votes. It is not known who made this error or how it happened.The council is now set to seek court approval to look at those votes and enter them into the counting system to establish what would have happened if they had been counted.
If they would have changed the result for Cllr Hainey, the council will need further court approval to formally re-run the count for the whole Langside ward.
Terrible reporting. Might I suggest that the buck falls with the Returning officer: George Black. From experience in Dundee, the returning officer is a high ranking council bean counter paid a hefty 5 figure fee for the role.
The second set of quotes is the most in need of analysis though.
A court order is needed to re-look at the votes and run them. Should it change then another court order is needed to re-run the count.
Why isn’t this being picked up?
Surely the default should be that it is reran, with a courts intervening should a count not be re-run under these circumstances.
Democracy my arse.
As an aside, how bloody good are the graphs Lallands is producing for his psephological analysis of the results? Electoral nerd drool.