Last year I was one of the Open Rights Groups election observers watching every thing go wrong with the e-voting and e-counting trails across England and Scotland.
The e-counting company that will be running the London elections was the company that ran the Beckland election in 2007. Breckland's Dereham-Humbletoft ward, the one ward in England that was counted both electronically and manually, was found to have 56.1% more District Council votes than when e-counted. I think thats worth repeating they managed to miss over half the votes while e-counting. We will not see that this time, because they have refused to do a manual recount of even a tiny percentage of the votes, some thing that ORG is asking them to do to check that the machines can be trusted.
I expect that on the night I will have to once again file an election observers report that says "I hope the election was fair but I have no way of telling it was."
Just picking randomly look at page 52, where the SNP nearly lost the Scottish election because of the width of a laptop screen and Excel, or page 23 of the picture of the web based voting in Rushmore where the ballet was changed so that the Conservative candidate had a Labour logo next to his name and the phrase "Conservation Party Candidate" under his name instead of "Conservative Party Candidate".
Comments
Last year I was one of the Open Rights Groups election observers watching every thing go wrong with the e-voting and e-counting trails across England and Scotland.
The e-counting company that will be running the London elections was the company that ran the Beckland election in 2007. Breckland's Dereham-Humbletoft ward, the one ward in England that was counted both electronically and manually, was found to have 56.1% more District Council votes than when e-counted. I think thats worth repeating they managed to miss over half the votes while e-counting. We will not see that this time, because they have refused to do a manual recount of even a tiny percentage of the votes, some thing that ORG is asking them to do to check that the machines can be trusted.
I expect that on the night I will have to once again file an election observers report that says "I hope the election was fair but I have no way of telling it was."
P.S.
If you want to read more on the things that went wrong on the May 2007 election check out the Open Rights Groups election report.
Just picking randomly look at page 52, where the SNP nearly lost the Scottish election because of the width of a laptop screen and Excel, or page 23 of the picture of the web based voting in Rushmore where the ballet was changed so that the Conservative candidate had a Labour logo next to his name and the phrase "Conservation Party Candidate" under his name instead of "Conservative Party Candidate".