London Mayor votes will be counted electronically

Electronic vote counting will be used in the UK for the first time during the London Mayor and Assembly elections on 4 May.

The government gave the system the go-ahead after a February trial of the election was deemed a success by Minister for London Keith Hill, who announced the decision on the advice of Rob Hughes, the Greater London Returning Officer.

Hill said yesterday that the electronic counting equipment will be used to count the votes in all 13 London constituencies, because he is "satisfied that the system can deliver a speedy and accurate result, and safeguard the probity and secrecy of the ballot".

A spokeswoman for the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions said that in the rehearsal, the system supplied by UK-based Data and Research Services (DRS) counted votes based on a 60 per cent turn in the West Central constituency - comprising the three boroughs of Westminster, Kensington and Chelsea, and Hammersmith and Fulham.

Malcolm Brighton, managing director at DRS, said the system will mean "Londoners should know who is to be Mayor by breakfast time the day after polling. A manual count of this size and complexity, with four votes cast by each elector, could take up to three days to complete."

DRS supplies operating scanners, which read the ballot papers and feed the results into a computer system in each constituency.

The scanners have been used in proportional representation elections around the world, including Norway and Bosnia.

In the trial, more than 500 boxes of completed ballot papers with some 1.6 million votes were fed through the machines using fictitious names. Two ballot papers for each voter - one for the Mayor and one for the London Assembly - were taken into account.

Voters will put a cross in a box as usual, but will be asked not to fold their ballot papers so they can be loaded straight onto the electronic counting machines.