Votes for the City Hall elections will be counted electronically - with a Spanish company that has been at the centre of previous controversies in charge of the process.

The firm, Indra, last year won a £4.3 million contract for the 1 May poll. But it oversaw two local elections last year outside London that it was trialling new technology descended into chaos.

At a count in Bedford, it took 16 hours before all the results were declared - four times longer than the time it would have taken to process the votes manually. One candidate said the delay was like waiting for an elephant to give birth.

The other, in Breckland in Norfolk, finally ended four and a half days after voting closed.

Officials had to abandon the count over a Bank Holiday weekend and count more than 24,000 ballots by hand.

Indra, which also conducted elections in Venezuela in which Hugo Chavez was elected, won the London contract after undercutting a bid from rival firm DRS, which was blamed for chaotic scenes in last year's elections to the Scottish Parliament when 100,000 votes were lost.

DRS was used in London in 2000 and 2004, with more than 500,000 votes being rejected, though mainly because electors could not understand the complex voting system.

Indra is printing the 12 million ballot papers for London in Spain and delivering them by truck. It plans to refer any doubtful papers rejected by the electronic scanning machines to human adjudicators.

It says that it has modified the Breckland problems and such a situation cannot happen again.

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