Over 21k spoilt votes in Midlands - North West from nearly 600k votes.
37k spoilt votes out of 720k votes in South.
Good that people are voting and no doubt, there are quite a few spoilt votes on purpose but I wonder what percentage of these are actually people not knowing how to 'vote' properly? i.e. maybe putting an X in one box or whatever.
Probably doesn't help when there's a ballot paper 2 foot long!!!
A mix of things really. There was a court case arising from one of the local election counts in 2014 that resulted in the whole count being recounted over 18 months later, but without changing the result. The upshot of it was that each ballot paper must have a number one marked on it to be valid, though I'm not sure if having only one X on it is still counted or not. What used to happen it seems is that people might mark 1,2,3 etc on the local election paper and carry on to the european paper, 4/5/6 etc. Seems silly but it happened. In that case the latter would no longer be counted as a valid vote. Also from being at counts you'd sometimes see people marking X's for more than one candidate, often beside the candidates of one party (someone who presumably wanted to vote for the FF/SF/FG ticket) without copping that it wouldn't count. And then there's the usual blank papers and the few with writing on it of whatever kind.
But the issues from the court case would seem to be part of the reason for so many papers being rejected.
