London mayoral election missing 41,000 votes...

Prepare yourself for an onslaught of conspiracy, outrage, and disgust as it is revealed that the results of the London Mayoral election may have been incorrectly counted due to a problem with the voting machines!?!? Reports over at the Guardian suggest that technological deficiencies may have 'accidentally' led to the loss of upto 41,000 voters' data, meaning that their votes were never even counted. And, to think, they call this 'liberty'...

Actually, we're not really that bothered: The boffins in charge of such things over at the Open Rights Group (ORG) have suggested that, even if the votes were counted, it wouldn't have had much of an effect on the election's outcome - Boris Johnson won by almost 140,000 votes after second choices were taken into consideration. So, assuming that Ken had got managed to acquire 100% of the missing votes, he still wouldn't have had a chance...

"The system threw up a number of problems and an unacceptable level of uncertainty," said Becky Hogge of ORG, an organisation that campaigns for technological issues that affect members of the public, "When you bring computers into the mix, you get trouble because they deal in absolutes, not judgement. What we'd like to see is a proper cost-benefit analysis of whether it's worth using electronic counting at all."

Obviously, if the margin by which Bojo had defeated Ken had been smaller than it was, the problems caused by the blip would have been myriad. Problems that the machines can face include counting blank ballot boxes as votes, jams in scanning machines, and system freezes. Perhaps they should just start training monkeys or something?

Everybody knows the famous story of George Bush's presidential victory thanks to supposed technological problems (amongst other things), which leads us to ask: Why does this only seem to happen when right wing politicians win something (or are we just imagining things)?

Answers on a post card please...

Photo: Flickr

Written by Oli Anderson on 2 Jul 2008 5:22 PM. There are 2 comments so far. Permalink