Police called in to investigate criminal activity by No Campaign.

Quick update: Following referral to the Crown Office and Prosecutor Fiscal for advice on whither postal vote sampling prior to the count is a crime, it has been agreed that it is and the police are investigating with Wee Ruth having been interviewed.

This folks is a big deal, a bloody big deal. Most of you won’t be aware of the ins and outs of election law but it looks as if Ruth Davidson let the cat out of the bag on illegal vote disclosure.

Why is it I hear you all say “wait Davie, go back, illegal vote disclosure, what in seven hells is that?” Basically, when postal votes are opened is is illegal to try to find out how a person voted and it is illegal to tell anyone about any vote that you did accidentally see.

First of all let me explain what should have happened, then what Ruth Davidson admitted the No campaign were up and finally how this criminal activity was used to change the result of the referendum.

It all comes down to postal votes. If you postal voted like me this is what you did to vote:
1) You filled in your ballot slip and put it in a pocket on the main letter which you stuck down to make the inner envelope.
2) You wrote your date of birth and signed the top half of the letter i.e. the bit with your name and address on it.
3) You put the whole thing in an outer envelope and stuck it in the post.

This is what happened when your postal vote reached the election centre.

1) The outer envelope was opened by an election official.
2) Your name, date of birth and signature was checked against your voter registration form to confirm that it was you who voted, again by an election official.
3) The inner envelope with your ballot in it was opened and your ballot placed face down. The reference number on the back of the ballot was checked against the reference number on the main piece of paper to check that this was indeed your ballot, again by an election official.
4) The ballots are placed into locked plastic bins without being looked at, to be counted on the evening of the vote after the polls close.

This process got repeated several times in each voting region in the run up to voting day as postal votes arrive, every day or so.

Now during this whole process counting agents from Yes and No are allowed to stand and watch what is going on. This is to make sure that no fake postal votes are snuck in. They are allowed to watch as the names and signatures are checked against the voter registration, when the reference numbers on the back of the ballots are checked and finally to see that the ballots are placed in the locked plastic bins.

From this point forward the locked postal vote bins from each opening of postal votes is stored until the polls close and the count begins. At this time the bins are opened. At this time each locked bin from an opening of a postal vote as well as each bin from a polling station is opened at the count. Each bin is opened and the ballots poured out onto a table. The ballots are thing unfolded and piled faceup ready to be sorted into YES and NO. Each ballot bin is done separately.

This is when a process is called “Ballot Sampling” is allowed and is 100% legal. What happens is that as the election agent when empties the votes out an offical observer from each group was allowed to watch. Indeed there were offical count observers from each campaign watching every ballot box be opened. As the ballots are sorted face up and the total number from each ballot bin is counted by the election agent, an offical observer can by simply counting a few hundred ballots as they whizz past assert how many YES and how many NO and then work out the %YES and %NO from each polling station and postal vote opening before they are officially counted. Add them all up, multiple by the total number of votes per bin and divide by the number of bins and you get the result before the offical count. It is not the exact final number, but it is pretty good, say within 1%.

This Ballot Sampling is competely legal if done by an offical observer after the poll has closed. This is allowed because there is no way of changing the result of the poll. However to do this during the opening of the postal votes is completely illegal, indeed it is a specific crime in the referendum act. What Ruth Davidson admitted on live TV was that Better Together illegally sampled ballots during the postal vote opening.

This is what they appear to have done:
Better Together official counting observer, we will call him “Robert” watched election official “Elizabeth” open 1000 postal ballots at an offical opening as she checked the names and the reference numbers and then placed them in the locked bin. He should be only checking that no extra votes got snuck in but what Robert actually was doing was counting which way each person voted when by chance the ballot paper happened to come out of the inner envelope face up. Say he saw 100 of the ballots as they were taken out and placed in the bin. Of the 100 he saw 35 were YES and 65 were NO. So he knows that about 65% of postal votes opened on that day were NO. He then told Better Together Officals the tallies he had counted, who added up all the numbers across the Nation for each day that postal votes were opened. This data was then pasted up to the leaders of Better Togther including Ruth Davidson.

Now this finding out how people postal voted and telling other people is illegal, it is specifically a crime under the Independence referendum Act. Here is the section:

Requirement of secrecy

7 Every person attending the proceedings in connection with the issue or the receipt of ballot papers for persons voting by post in the referendum must maintain and aid in maintaining the secrecy of voting in the referendum and must not—

(d)attempt to ascertain at the proceedings in connection with the receipt of the ballot papers the outcome for which any vote is given in any particular ballot paper or communicate any information with respect thereto obtained at those proceedings.

The criminal activity that Ruth Davidson appears to have admitted to on live TV is criminal due to it being possible to use the information they found out during the postal vote opening to effect the outcome of the vote. Let me explain how they did this.

A crucial point in any vote is when the voter is actually standing with pencil in hand about to make their vote. They might tell polling agencies that they will vote YES or vote NO but when it comes to the point they need to think “ohh God it is just too scary I will vote No” or will they needed to think “I know it is uncertain but I want change, I’m voting YES”. This polling booth switching is crucial especially in close run votes like this one. What the illegal activity allowed Better togther to do is to compare a postal voting intention poll by a company such as YOUGOV to the actual postal voting every day from the start of postal voting to the final voting day. This would tell them what people were doing in the supposed sanctity of the pooling booth, when they made their apparently secret ballot.

For example if their YOUGOV poll results were that 25% of postal voters on a given day said they were going to vote YES but their criminal Ballot Sampling told them that 35% of them actually voted YES, they knew that in the sanctity of the voting booth 10% of people would have changed their vote from NO to YES. With polls showing that YES was at about 42% they knew 3 weeks before the vote that they would lose.

It appears that it was this illegal postal Ballot sampling that lead to the DevoMax vow, it had nothing to do with the single 51% YES poll that came out, it was just a convenient excuse to change the nature of the vote from Status Quo v Independence to DevoMax v Independence. By making the NO vote more appealing to the undecided voters and the 10% of polling booth switchers they were able to win the final vote.

Let’s not mince our words here, if Ruth Davidson’s confession is true, this vote needs to be re-run and a large number of Better Together officials jailed.