Friday, May 04, 2007

What an (electronic) voting disaster

I waxed lyrical a couple of months ago about e-voting.

Swindon elections were to be conducted using touch-screen systems in polling stations, or voters could opt to score their ballot paper (sic) by logging onto a computer at home.

Well it all went disastrously wrong. The systems crashed, the machines would not work, it all went rather embarrassingly wrong.

And to add pain to the complete mess up... Swindon Borough Council was awarded beacon status for it's electoral services this year. Should we give the award back?

Still, at least it was not quite as bad as Scotland where two types of voting - first past the post for local elections and single transferable votes for the Parliament meant close to 100,000 ballot papers were spoilt... potentially many of these because the voter was confused when confronted with two ballot papers and either marked local elections paper with 1,2,3 when it should have been an X. Or marked the Scottish Parliament ballot paper with an X when it should have been 1,2,3.

What a mess. And what a shambles for democracy.

I asked the question back in February... is it the end of pencil and paper voting? The clear answer is NO!