Thumbs down to e-voting

The Open Rights Group (ORG) said it could not express confidence in the election results recorded in areas where it observed the counting of votes.

And the group said that, following the experiences of May 3 when new voting systems led to large numbers of spoilt ballots in the Scottish Parliament elections and confusion at counts for English local authorities, it remains opposed to the introduction of e-voting and e-counting in the UK.

The May elections saw a number of trials of new voting methods, including voting by telephone or computer and electronic counting of ballot papers.

The report records "chaotic scenes", with counts slowed by malfunctioning scanners and software errors, as well as fold marks, perforations and tears making ballot papers unreadable to scanners.

Laptop computers used for voting in Swindon proved "unreliable", while online voters in Sheffield "had trouble casting their votes", according to the report.

Telephone voting systems appeared to cause particular difficulty to the elderly and housebound - the groups they were intended to help.

The ORG raised concerns that e-voting elections are "open to error and fraud" because they use "black box systems" where the mechanisms for recording and tabulating the vote are hidden away, making public scrutiny impossible.

The lack of reliable "audit trails" allowing counts to be checked meant that there was "no meaningful way to verify that voters' intentions had been accurately counted".

In the only ward in England where votes were counted both manually and electronically - Dereham Humbletoft in Breckland Council, Norfolk - the number of ballots recorded was 56% higher when counted by hand rather than by machine, the report found.