Will London’s election be open to fraud or error?

TODAY the Open Rights Group are warning that the London electronic count may be open to fraud or error, without any easy means to determine if results are correct.

As a result, they are sending a voluntary team of election Observers to watch the London election votes being collected and tomorrow, counted electronically.

At the last election, ORG declared that they were unable to view the election as safe. Jim Killock, Executive Director, said:

“We will be assessing how easily the machines could be tampered with, and whether it is possible to manually verify that the software has not been tampered with.

“We all know that computers can be hacked and can break down. In an election, this makes electronic counting vulnerable to fraud or error, as well as expensive to run.

“We will watch the count, and give our views to the Electoral Commission.”

The changes ORG asked for after the last election included public examination of the software code and manual sample counts of the ballot papers, in order to verify the electronic count. Neither call has been met.