Can of worms: Scottish Independence

[MrBehemoth]

I feel quite strongly on this, so apologies if it's TL;DR! It's just that I really believe democracy has taken place and people now need to accept it. If the nation had voted "yes", I would accept that. Salmond's resignation on Friday just goes to show that he was not acting in the best interests of the country, or he would continue to do so. He has left an aftermath of resentment. People need to stop picking the vote apart and look to the future.

I've heard a lot of rumours about the vote being rigged, and yeah this conspiracy probably occurs on any vote because people aren't satisfied, but I'm a bit curious.

The "yes" voters are surprised and hurt, so of course people are going to look for justification. Their passion made them so sure that they're now asking "How could this have happened?" For me, personally, I'm not surprised it turned out how it did. The rallies and campaigners were shouting "yes!" but when I actually spoke to real people in my life, over 50% (maybe more like 75%) of them were quietly saying "no". It's like what I was saying earlier about the loud minority and the quiet majority. I'm not saying that all the "quiet" people voted "no", far from it, but all the passion and bluster of the "yes" campaign was not visible in the everyday lives of folk who were just calmly making up their minds.

But the "yes" campaign, on the other hand, was so, so, confident that everyone else in Scotland felt the same as they did...

I was sent this video so I checked it out. I'm not one to believe things right away, so I don't know what to think of the legitimacy of it, but it does looks fairly suspicious.

Ok, there are a few things in this video that don't look good on face value, so let's analyse them one by one, thinking about what we can actually see.

• In the first clip, a counter moves a small pile of ballot papers from one pile to another. She does this once, even though the clip is looped to make it look like she does it three or more times. The small pile she moves, if you watch carefully, is only two papers. The "no" pile is quite small too. She's clearly just started working on this batch.
  This is what I see: she takes a paper and spends some time looking at it, maybe the "X" is faint, or maybe some thought distracts her. She puts it on the wrong pile. She immediately notices her mistake and puts it on the correct pile. She realises that she has made this mistake 2 times already, so she goes to the effort of checking the papers in the "yes" pile and putting them in the "no" pile. Now, if she was deliberately putting "yes" papers in the "no" pile in the interest of rigging the vote, she would have no reason to check them. We do know it's late and it's safe to assume she's probably both tired and excited. She made a human error, she checked it, she rectified it, she moved on.
  
• In the second clip, here is what we can see: there is a table, labelled "no", with bundles of ballot papers on it; the vote is visible on the top ballot of some of the stacks; either there are "yes" bundles and "no" bundles stacked on this table, or else each bundle contains a mixture of "yes" and "no" papers. What we don't know is when or why these bundles have been put on this particular table.
  There is no reason to assume that these ballots have even been sorted. There are myriad reasons why they could be mixed at the time the recording was made. The turn-out for this referendum was far bigger than anyone expected, perhaps the papers are waiting on this table to be counted:
  "We've run out of space, boss. Where should I put these papers?"
  "Oh just stick them on that table there."
  "But that's the "no" table..."
  "Well, we're not using it yet. We'll clear it off as we count them."
  I'm not saying that's what happened, we have no evidence of that, but we have no reason to assume otherwise either.
  
  
• In the third clip, we see a man writing something on the top sheet of what appears to be a bundle of ballot papers, before putting an elastic band round them. The view is quite zoomed out, so we don't know what he is writing. Now, the clip starts in the middle of him writing, so we don't know how long he has been writing for, but we can see he is making more than the two strokes required to make an "X". He's writing words. There are a lot of different roles to be played in counting a vote. I don't know what they are or what this guy's job is, but maybe he's spot-checking the bundle for accuracy and signing the top one, "Checked by Bob McCounter, 18/09/14 4:30am" or somesuch. Or maybe these are spoiled papers and he's writing the reason why they cannot be included. Maybe the top paper in the bundle isn't a ballot but rather a label of some kind. Or it's even conceivable that he is deliberately spoiling them, but that nicely leads me on to my next point...

In all three clips, we are examining the overt actions of employees of the Scottish Electoral Commission. These are not passers by who will disappear after the count. They are vetted employees who have been given specific tasks to perform upon specific allotments of ballot papers at specific times, all of which is planned and recorded.

Furthermore, all papers carry a unique number. It is possible to trace the provenance of any one ballot paper backwards from where it is stored in the archive/warehouse/wherever-they-end-up, who transported it there, who prepared it for transport, who actually counted it, who sorted it into yes/no piles, who removed it from the ballot box, right down to which member of the public actually made the vote, where and at what time, and who handed them the paper in the first place. Aside from members of the public and the press being present and able to record videos of the process, the employed counters are in full view of their colleagues and in most cases will be on CCTV.

I find it very, very hard to believe that the Electoral Commission, either as a whole or it's individual members, would risk committing electoral fraud under these very strict, very transparent and very traceable conditions.

There have, however, been some other suspicious incidents that have been recorded by legitimate press and/or investigated by the police. For the sake of balance, let's look at those.

• In Glasgow, there were ten cases (0.002% of votes cast in Glasgow) where someone turned up at a polling station pretending to be someone else, voted and left, then the real person turned up later. Another possibility is that the ten people came back again and tried to vote twice. These cases are being investigated by the police.
  
  
• In the Dundee International Sports Centre, set up as the counting facility in Dundee, the fire alarm went off three times during the counting. On two of those occasions the building was evacuated for over ten minutes. The Fire Brigade investigated, found it to be a false alarm and the staff were allowed back inside to resume from where they left off. On the third occasion the alarm was deactivated as soon as it went off and there was no evacuation.
  Personally, I feel that is quite suspicious. It was reported that it was set off by an e-cigarette, but they emit steam, not smoke, and don't set off fire alarms. If the building had a faulty alarm system, it seems odd that it would not have been noticed and dealt with prior to the counting. It seems likely that someone set it off on purpose, whether to sneak back and tamper with ballots or just for the hell of it.
  But, if I was the person in charge of the count in Dundee, I would have insisted on staying inside in the counting hall until there was actual evidence of a real fire. If you watch this video at 1:00, there seem to be staff keeping watch on the counting hall while the firemen wait for the all-clear. In the image on this page, you can see there is a police man and one other person remaining behind (maybe also a photographer, but the camera might have been left on a tripod). Whether or not anyone did tamper with anything is a different story, but it certainly seems that someone was trying to.

So, these are the two genuinely suspicious occurrences that I have come across. One was extremely minor and committed by a handful of members of the public. The other was potentially major, but thwarted by continued vigilance. I do not hold that anything in the conspiracy video is genuinely suspicious.

What is interesting to point out, however, is that the two regions that had the strongest "yes" vote, were the two regions that had the lowest turn out, against those who were expected to vote. It seems sad to me that where people seem most passionate about change, that is also where people seem less likely to do something about it, which leads me to wonder if those particular "yes"-shouting non-voters had genuine passion, or whether they were just mouthing off.

Oh, and one last thought to leave you with: those two regions were Glasgow and Dundee.