• The same counting machines
  
• The same electoral services contractor
  
• The same ballot paper designs
  
• and the same complexity (Londoners actually were voting in three elections - Mayor, Assembly and European elections - with up to five votes to cast)

That was between 3.5% and 10.5% of turnout depending on the GLA constituency.  And that figure was actually lower than the number of spoilt ballots the first time the Assembly was elected: outrageously, in 2000, as many as 16% of votes cast (18,853 ballots) were spoilt in the City & East constituency (which covers Barking & Dagenham, Newham and Tower Hamlets).

Yet curiously virtually nothing was mentioned about this scandal at the time; there was no Electoral Commission inquiry; no candidates mooted legal challenges and the political parties seemed blissfully unconcerned about the invalidation of so many Londoners' right to vote.

Perhaps if it had been somewhat more concern might have been given towards rolling this out to an entire national election.  It is utterly inexcusable that not a single concern was raised about the balloting process planned for Scotland given the experience those in responsibility for it had of the London elections.

At the GLA count I attended in 2004, the Returning Officer eventually gave up even bothering to adjudicate the spoilt ballots (and in my consituency "only" 7,000 ballots were spoilt): there were literally boxes of ballots rejected by the machines that had yet to be determined - but against my wishes it was decided that the uncounted votes were unlikely to alter the comfortably Tory lead that had already been amassed so, given activists and officers had been going for almost 12 hours, the mood was why bother.

I'm not sure how the Electoral Commission can be expected to enquire independently when it must carry the principal responsibility for being negligent in even highlighting, let alone attempting to rectify, the problems we in London experienced with this nice-in-theory system before blithely urging its use in Scotland.

Dare I say it but Alex Salmond is right: there needs to be a genuinely independent inquiry presided over by none of the bodies that had any hand in this debacle.  We have less than a year now before the next London elections.  We cannot have a repeat of this scandalous laissez faire approach to the rights of the electorate to have their vote counted.