Examination of Witnesses (Questions 200-219)
MR RON
GOULD, CM AND
MR MICHAEL
BODA
15 JANUARY 2008
Q200 Mr Wallace: Who were they?
Mr Boda: We are talking about
meeting with politicians and Members of Parliament, meeting with
MPs here, meeting with the Scotland Office, meeting with a variety
of stakeholders; that is where we were generating these general
issues. I think what is a little disconcerting is that you could
go through and pick up on all those statements where we talk about
political issues, but it is also about the fragmentation of the
system that is involved, so laying all the responsibility in one
place is very difficult to do, but you could do that if you go
through and pick up quotes throughout the entire report.
Q201 Mr Wallace: With respect, if
you look at the evidence submitted by SOLAR and others, they do
not talk about all parties, they talk about the decision-making
process by the minister and they quote "the lack of meetings
and the lack of legal representation from the Scotland Office
and Scottish Executive at these meetings contrasted markedly with
the experience in 2003". The fragmented decision-making still
existed in 2003, the legislation was less up to date because they
had not had the 2006 Electoral Administration Act, but the evidence
does not suggest that the minister was behaving in a way that
best suited everybody, the evidence that you refer to yourself
in the paragraph, from SOLAR and SOLACE, says that it was the
administration of those legislative guidelines that contributed
to some of the muck-up, not the decoupling. Yes, they are different
factors in it, but certainly in this issue, the issue of how they
work with sub-groups, how they managed or man-managed the process,
was failing or inadequate. That is what the Scottish Society of
Local Authority Lawyers said, that is what the Society of Scottish
Local Authority Chief Executives said, so when you came to this
conclusion who were the other people that you discussed the evidence
with? You say "a range of stakeholders" but specifically
when you talk about those failures, who were they?
Mr Boda: I was just thinking that
you are really focused on the one stakeholder, but there would
be a variety and that would be other MPs that we would have spoken
with, the public that we would have spoken with, with election
administrators individually. SOLAR does not represent all the
electoral administrators in terms of their individual views, but
it was a corporate view that we would have come up with.
Q202 Chairman: Mr Gould, is it fair
to say then that the Scotland Office and the Scottish Executive
were trying to build consensus to hold these elections and during
this process they took bad advice from other political parties?
Mr Gould: Certainly from our discussions
we had the impression that there were extensive discussions held,
both at the Scotland Office and the Scottish Executive and that
some, if not a lot, of the delays involved—which were only
part of the difficulties that were caused—resulted because
of the fact that there was a very wide party interest on the part
of various parties and the parties argued, expressed and, in the
case of the Scottish Executive, they then turned it over to a
parliamentary committee to further explore it and then go to Cragg
Ross Dawson because they could not reach a decision. Party interest
therefore played an important role in the whole process but it
is only one segment of the process, there are other aspects which
had a very major impact that we have explained in here and perhaps
there is some distortion in focusing only on the party problems
because the parties contributed, but certainly they were not the
sole contributor or necessarily the major contributor to the whole
process. You look at the legislation, which was so fragmented
that I do not know how any party or any administrator could even
manage to make decisions. Those kinds of things all contributed
to the difficulties that arose.
Q203 Mr Davidson: I want to concentrate
in most of what I ask here on moving forward, but we have to go
back a little bit. Is it fair for me to read into what you have
been saying that there was no exception to the neglect of the
voters' interests amongst all the interest groups and stakeholders
that participated in this exercise?
Mr Gould: In terms of the voter
interest being missed or not being dealt with, I think there were
no exceptions, but at the same time there were aspects of the
voters' interests that were taken into account, some successfully
and some not successfully. In other words they had the Cragg Ross
Dawson study but they did not follow up when there was an indication
that there would be problems with the ballot.
Q204 Mr Davidson: Am I right in thinking
that the system was a shambles and the whole operation was full
of well-meaning bumblers, and really the lessons that we have
got to learn are those two. The thing that strikes me about your
initial comments and then your clarification is that you appear
almost touchingly naive in that, having allocated blame in the
way that you did, not to expect then that narrow sectarian interests
would actually pick that up and attempt to use that as a stick
with which to beat government ministers. Do you regret that now,
that the words that you used and the context in which you explained
them were actually then misused by bad people to try and allocate
blame?
Mr Gould: I do not regret having
made the statements; I do regret that the focus has been on those
statements as opposed to looking to how to resolve this because
the interests of Scotland and the Scottish voter really depend
on looking at the report's recommendations as opposed to the background
and the identification of the problems.
Mr Boda: To this extent this is
how it works when we go around the world and do reports. We do
the best job that we can and if there are issues to raise we raise
them, but ultimately in the end this happens.
Q205 Mr Davidson: I appreciate that
there are a lot of bad people about, there are a large number
of bad people about, but can I just clarify, and again it is arising
from points that other people made, you mentioned and I think
Ben quoted the question of party self-interest when it came to
the question of the counting of votes. I do not quite follow this
point because I cannot see that any of the individual parties
are likely to gain more votes as a result of counting them at
different times or in different ways; maybe you should clarify
for me how you meant this question of the parties pursuing their
own self-interest in the question of counting, because this is
another allegation that you make against ministers.
Mr Gould: I believe—and
please clarify this if I am wrong—that you are referring
to the comments related to the overnight count.
Q206 Mr Davidson: Yes, it is the
point that Ben was quoting.
Mr Gould: The concern that we
expressed here was that in terms of the overnight count, certainly
this was one area where the interest of the voter was very much
a secondary consideration, it was speed versus quality basically.
Our understanding, and I think it is codified, was that for the
most part if not unanimously the returning officers strongly recommended
against an overnight count, the Electoral Commission strongly
recommended against an overnight count and it was the candidates
and the parties basically that encouraged the overnight count
to be carried out.
Q207 Mr Davidson: If I can follow
that up, surely that is a bit like the apocryphal story of the
East German restaurant that used to close for lunch so that the
staff could have their lunch when it suited them. The fact that
staff do not want to count at a time that is inconvenient to them
is more to do with producer domination rather than genuinely an
issue about what is in the voters' interests. We have a long tradition
in this country that you cast your vote, you wake up in the morning
and you know then who has won. That is not a question of the parties'
interest because no one party is going to benefit from that as
distinct from the other, that is a question of the producers wanting
to get paid when they are working when they are actually getting
paid for their normal jobs—those are the local authorities—and
not wanting to be inconvenienced, so that is not really a question
of you abusing the voters' trust, that is a question of a vested
interest paddling its own canoe, is that not correct?
Mr Gould: I think the voters'
interest is the key here. Here in the UK, Scotland in particular,
this is one of the few jurisdictions in the world where polls
close as late as 10.00 p.m. That is the first problem, which means
that the count does not start at 10.00 p.m., the count starts
when the ballot boxes arrive and also the count is delayed more
and more because of the postal ballots which increased to 11%
this time, next time will probably increase more and on top of
that there will be the demand for identified signatures, which
means that the whole count is going to go much, much longer—at
least, that is the probability. The problem here is not necessarily
the counting but the adjudication, the decision being made on
the validity of each voter's ballot, especially those ones that
need a review. To do that when you have a staff that has been
working for 16 to 20 hours previously the day before, to do this
in the wee hours of the morning is in my view not taking the voters'
interests into account. It was interesting that many of the comments
that we had, including some from the media, were saying that the
voter goes to bed, the voter is not interested and wakes up in
the morning and finds out. All the drama and the interest in the
whole process could therefore be accelerated and enhanced by a
count the next day, but that is for internal discussion.
Q208 Mr Wallace: I want to confirm
for the record that the quote I was referring to also was in the
section that referred to uncoordinated decision-making in the
administration of the legislation. I wanted to just question about
the administration of the process because we did have a process
in 2003 that, whilst not as complicated because of the single
transferable vote and that sort of thing, did work fairly well
and the sub-committees were there involved with new Acts et cetera
and implementation. This is a point that I think is quite important,
the administration of that process is in the hands of the Government,
it is not in the hands of the Opposition although they can take
part in the sub-committees or whatever they are. A number of your
points talk about either Whitehall, for example delay in enacting
the Electoral Administration Act—which was a ten-month delay
by Whitehall, that was not a Scotland Office responsibility, it
was Constitutional Affairs or whatever department it was—and
delays in meetings with sub-groups and advisory groups. What evidence
did you gather of how many times did the minister or secretary
of state meet with those groups, or how long was it before these
problems bubbled to the surface? How much was left to the officials
and then oh my God, it is December, we had better get on with
it and were there monthly meetings with the minister, did the
minister ever meet the sub-groups? We have identified earlier
on that the Electoral Commission saw problems and never did anything
about them, they never really took it to the door. How involved
was the minister in the process and when did it really come to
their attention that there may be some complications?
Mr Boda: Our view would be that
much of the work took place around the steering group and it is
there where you would see engagement of ministers, where you would
see engagement of all the stakeholders, and that was really the
realm in which the ministers would be involved. They would be
engaged on a regular basis—that is our understanding of
it—but what we had found in the context of the steering
group is, going back to the institutional arrangement there, that
there was no arrangement to make decisions in that context, it
was very consultative and so it was very difficult for us to understand
how decisions were being made in the context of that steering
group.
Q209 Mr Wallace: When the steering
group produced a recommendation or a report, how did it get to
the decision-maker? They would have their meeting, they would
discuss their timetable or whatever it was. As in 2003 it seemed
to be that if the subject was to do with the elections for the
Scottish Parliament it was chaired by a Scotland Office individual,
if it was discussions about local government it was chaired by
a Scottish Executive official. Was it the job of that official
to take that recommendation to the minister, the decision-maker,
or did it just move on to the next agenda? What was your experience
of that?
Mr Boda: It is our understanding,
again going back to the steering group and the revisions to it
that we suggest, no actual decisions could be made within the
steering group; recommendations could be made and when those recommendations
were made then they would be taken back to the minister, but the
minister would not attend those meetings.
Q210 Mr Wallace: Were those recommendations
then acted upon and how many times did the steering group meet?
One of the complaints by SOLAR was that the sub-group hardly ever
met.
Mr Boda: We found that to be problematic,
yes, that the sub-groups did not meet often.
Q211 Mr Wallace: My point is did
you find a lack of meeting between these co-ordinating bodies,
whether it was the steering group or the sub-group, and a lack
of recommendations coming out of them, or that when the recommendations
were made—few and far between—that the ministers did
not act? Who hosted this thing, who was responsible for setting
the agenda, for arranging the next meeting, who made that decision.
Mr Boda: You have identified the
fundamental issue that we have talked about in the report, and
that is that it is not clear as to how the steering group exactly
should work, and that we are calling for greater clarification
in that regard.
Mr Gould: We were provided with
a chart of the steering group and the sub-groups; the arrows were
going every way, backwards, forwards, upside down, it was mind-boggling
to try to determine exactly if and when a decision was made what
route it took and how it got to the minister or anyone else. This
is why we made our general comment that coordination was one area.
Q212 Mr Wallace: Did you ask the
chair of those steering groups, whether it was the Scottish Executive
or the Scotland Office, or did they submit evidence, did you inquire
why did they feel it was just floating around or if we asked the
official to come here would the official say it was fine, we never
had any problems with it, it worked in 2003 why did it not work
in 2007? Did you examine that?
Mr Boda: You are certainly welcome
to call upon others but the general view, the impression that
we got, was that this particular group needs refining in terms
of responsibility, accountability. It is a consultative body at
this point, whereas decisions could not necessarily be taken in
that context.
Mr Gould: It did not seem that
the indication that we got from some of these groups and committees
was that their decisions were going to be taken elsewhere. They
assumed or expected they might be taken to the minister or what
have you, but there was no pattern, there was no clear line of
authority, responsibility or direction, it was so fluid as we
saw it.
Q213 Mr Wallace: But you met with
the chairs of the steering committees, did you?
Mr Gould: Yes.
Q214 Mr Wallace: Both of them, the
Scottish Executive one and the Scotland Office one?
Mr Gould: We met with the steering
committee and the chair was there.
Q215 Mr Wallace: And he was a Scotland
Office figure or a Scottish Executive figure—quite senior
did you feel, or had this all been pushed to the backwoods?
Mr Gould: It was constituted of
the senior officials up in Edinburgh, but of course the minister
did not attend.
Q216 Mr Davidson: I am glad we have
clarified that the whole thing was a shambles and that ministers
were particularly to blame, but could I move on to the question
do you think that the Scotland Office received bad advice over
the design and layout of the Scottish parliamentary ballot papers?
Mr Gould: If I look at the results,
yes.
Q217 Mr Davidson: Maybe I could add to
that, could the Electoral Commission have done more to warn of
potential problems with the design of the paper?
Mr Gould: Definitely. I believe
that the Electoral Commission had been given warning signals from
the Cragg Ross Dawson study which they did not pursue, which they
should have pursued and which might have resolved the problem
and perhaps resulted in two separate ballot papers rather than
two ballots on one sheet.
Q218 Mr Davidson: Did Cragg Ross
Dawson not spot it themselves and flag it up to the Electoral
Commission who then did not spot it themselves, or was it flagged
up to the Electoral Commission and they did not pursue it? Why
was the sample so small; did you explore those areas at all?
Mr Gould: We did not deal with
Cragg Ross Dawson directly at all on this, but we did examine
the report. In terms of the Electoral Commission I think they
have already stated that they were remiss in not pursuing this
further, but whether that is because they were looking only at
the structural aspect rather than thinking of how the voter was
going to deal with this, I do not know.
Mr Boda: If you look at the report
we are very critical of that Cragg Ross Dawson report. The numbers
are low, it is qualitative and so there were concerns there the
moment we read it. At the same time as we received the report,
and we did and we went through it, we were able to pick up on
some of those red flags and we certainly would have followed up,
even if it was not particularly a good report; if there were concerns
that were outlined in it they should have been considered. I think
this leads to an overall issue that we flag in the report and
it has to do with the fact that when you are making such major
changes in the context of an electoral process you do take your
research very, very seriously and that you introduce a certain
amount of rigour in advance so that you have a much better understanding
of the impact that these changes will have.
Q219 Mr Davidson: It struck me in
looking at that section, in looking at this whole area, that this
was very much amateur-like and I am not sure whether or not it
was Cragg Ross Dawson that were the amateurs, the Electoral Commission
that were the amateurs or both of them that were just really getting
money for old rope, that both of them were negligent in what they
had done on this. What I am not clear about is why, for example,
was it such a small sample; was that just someone saving money,
was that what Cragg Ross Dawson recommended, and then not picking
up the results from a low sample. I find it difficult to get a
handle on why this thing went wrong.
Mr Gould: What we can tell you
is that according to both the Electoral Commission and the Cragg
Ross Dawson report the sample of 100 for this particular purpose
supposedly was a valid statistical sample—I am not a statistician—but
it was not the size of the sample that was the problem. Whether
it was the people that they sampled, certainly the results showed
that there were red flags which needed to be pursued. The other
question I guess that comes up here, and I am not sure how carefully
we explored it in great detail, was that all of these changes
were coming in at one time into the whole Scottish Election process
and the timeframe was getting smaller and smaller and smaller.
Perhaps that had an influencing factor in saying okay, we have
got this much out of it, we have to move on, we do not have time,
but I would not want to be categorical about that.
| 
