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On Twitter and YouTube, in blog posts and Facebook groups, sceptics have been amassing what they believe is evidence that the referendum was rigged, and its result, therefore, illegitimate.

Many refer to a snippet of video in which a counting officer at the Dundee polling station appears to lift votes from a yes pile and place them under no.

For many, the fire alarms that caused the brief evacuation of the Dundee count, and the fact that a Russian observer from a pro-Kremlin monitoring agency had claimed the ballot was fixed to avoid parallels to the situation in Crimea, were taken as further causes for suspicion.

Jim Sillars, the former deputy leader of the Scottish National party (SNP), used Twitter to distribute a video entitled “Exposed!” and call for an inquiry.
There was a faintly exasperated air at the office of the chief counting officer in Edinburgh over the rumours which, according to one observer, had “grown arms and legs” over the weekend.

All of the apparently suspicious evidence could be easily explained, said a spokeswoman, pointing out that the yes campaign itself had intervened on Twitter on Thursday night to reassure voters that there was nothing awry with the Dundee footage.

At times, uncounted ballots would be placed on tables that had yes or no signs attached before being sorted, she said. And piles that didn’t reach round numbers of 50 or 100 would be wrapped in a piece of paper on which the total number of votes would be written, explaining the Edinburgh footage.

In a statement, the chief counting officer, Mary Pitcaithly, said she was “satisfied that all counts throughout Scotland were properly conducted and scrutinised by thousands of people representing both the Yes Scotland and the Better Together campaigns, as well as international election observers, media and police. None of these people raised any concerns during the verification, counting and adjudication stages.”

Salmond may have claimed over the weekend that no voters were “gulled” and “tricked” into rejecting independence, but a spokesman said that neither he nor the SNP believed there was anything untoward about the count itself.

But passions, and suspicions, have been running high among some in Scotland for months, making the questioning of the poll perhaps unsurprising.

cybercarl wrote:I'm surprised they still use people to count votes. Surly in this day and age a machine would be quicker and more reliable Well as reliable as the person who programmed it.

(:-})