Will the 2012 election for Mayor of London be counted manually? Yes, at least, that’s the assumption the UK’s elections watchdog would like City Hall to make. The Electoral Commission’s report into the London Elections [pdf] has called for the Greater London Returning Officer to carry out a cost benefit analysis of options for counting [...]

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Yesterday the Greater London Authority’s Elections Review Committee met to discuss the conduct of the May 2008 London elections. The ORG 2008 Elections Report played an important role in their agenda and it was great to see it attached to the papers sent to all members.
First up were representatives from Indra (the e-counting supplier) and [...]

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Update:: Demand for the report is pretty high: for those having trouble downloading the report, we’ve put a copy of the report here too.

ORG’s report into e-counting of votes cast in the London Elections is out today. The report, which is the result of a huge team effort, finds that:
“there is insufficient evidence available to [...]

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The House of Commons Scottish Affairs Committee has released its report on the experience of the
Scottish elections and unsurprisingly they are worried about e-counting. Last year ORG sent observers to the Scottish elections and observed many problems including the SNP nearly failing to win because of an Excel spreadsheet. The Scottish Affairs Committee official report [...]

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A huge thanks to everyone who devoted their day to democracy last week, and joined the Open Rights Group Election Watch 2008. Over the next month, we’ll be compiling a report of what we saw at the elections, and specifically at the electronic count of 7 million ballot papers in Alexandra Palace, ExCel and [...]

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Update: The ORG Electionwatch08 pledge has succeeded in record time! Thanks to all of those who signed the pledge and agreed to dedicate 2 May 2008 to observing the electronic counting of votes for the London mayoral and London Assembly elections. Before the sun had set, 12 (and more) democracy enthusiasts had signed up. If [...]

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Many thanks to Glyn for watching, and transcribing the most interesting bits of, the Scottish Affairs Committee public evidence session in the House of Commons earlier this week. The Open Rights Group were particularly heartened by these words from Peter Wardle, Chief Executive of the Electoral Commission:
“Ron Gould sets his face firmly against [e-voting] for [...]

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In the May 2007 local elections Open Rights Group observers, accredited by the Electoral Commission, took part in the monitoring of pilot electronic voting and electronic counting schemes. We observed serious failings in the process. Since then, further problems have come to light in other countries leading to many electronic voting solutions being banned or [...]

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The Electoral Commission and the separate review by Ron Gould that the Commission instituted have published their reports on the Scottish elections of May 2007
The Gould Review in particular identifies a number of important issues, many of which ORG addressed in our own report on the elections published this June.

The Review identified ‘fragmented and antiquated’ [...]

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Our e-Voting campaign tour reached its triumphant climax this week in Blackpool. Jonathan Djanogly MP, the Shadow Solicitor General who was hugely complimentary about our work, joined Jason and the Electoral Commission on our panel to discuss the ills of electronic elections.
As in Brighton with the Lib Dems and in Bournemouth with Labour, the [...]

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