Mat Bowles

Not got time to do a proper write up from Yorkshire, but this is disgraceful:

The Scotsman also explains the kind of "errors" on ballot sheets that caused them to be rejected. One of these was to only cast a vote for the regional list. Both the constituency and the regional votes were on the same ballot paper. Many of the small parties only put candidates up for the regional vote. If you wanted to support, say, the Green Party - or more or less any of the smaller parties - and couldn't bring yourself to vote for one of the larger parties in the constituency, then your vote would be declared void.

The whole point of an MMS system is to allow smaller parties to run a list to get top up MPs/AMs when they know they're not going to win a constituency. To penalise their voters completely because they only wanted to vote for 'their' party? Utterly, completely, wrong. Legal challenges are in the pipeline, if this is true, and I've no reason to doubt it's not, then the parties that lost out (Solidarity, the Greens and the SSP for the most part) should be screaming blue murder. Go read rhythmaning's post, then spread the link. This is Great fucking Britain, we don't do hanging chads, we don't disenfranchise people, every damn vote should be counted damnit!