Electoral Commission concerned with electronic counting system

E-counting cost £5.2m in 2008, while a manual counting process would have cost £3.6m

The Electoral Commission has raised concerns over the Greater London Authority’s decision to press ahead with an electronic counting system in the next Mayor of London elections.

Greater London Returning Officer Leo Boland made it known last week that despite the additional costs to the tax payer of e-counting, and the fact that he had not had a final green light from the Electoral Commission, the GLA would begin the tendering process for firms to run the electronic process for counting votes.

The Electoral Commission was set up by Parliament to ensure fair standards are adhered to in the electoral process and has argued in a new report that there are risks associated with electronic counting. It noted that because there is such a lack of vendors in the e-counting market, there are realistically only two companies that will tender for the 2012 e-counting contract.

“Such a small market may make it more difficult for the Greater London Returning Officer to undertake a competitive tender process that secures value for money,” said the Commission’s report.

Also, with just one e-counting firm running the electoral process, there are likely to be capacity issues and it could allow the firm to assert a disproportionate level of control over the market, the Commission warned.

Additionally the fair standard body said the time it would take to manually count the 2012 election results had not been adequately assessed by the GLA in its cost-benefit analysis it released this June, when it compared manual counting to e-counting.

The Commission argued manual counting could potentially take less time than the GLA believed if more resources were spent on training and staff.

The GLA’s cost-benefit analysis was heavily skewed in favour of e-counting. It said manual counting takes too long and the media would become impatient with such a lengthy process. The analysis also said because manual counting in the London elections has not been used before, there is more potential for errors. Since 2000, ballot papers for all three London elections and the 2004 European election have been counted electronically.

However, the GLA did acknowledge that manual counting is significantly cheaper than e-counting. According to the GLA’s contract with technology vendor Indra, e-counting cost £5,159,018 in 2008. It is estimated a manual counting process would have cost £3,633,567.

In its latest report, the Electoral Commission dismissed the idea that manual counting holds less potential for errors than e-counting. It also said “transparency issues” with electronic systems had still not been addressed.

For example, the Commission raised concerns with the ballot box verification process as there were many discrepancies between the totals given by polling stations and those recorded by the scanners.

“We have, since 2007, been calling on the UK Government to consult on and publish an electoral modernisation strategy, to undertake a cost-benefit analysis of e-counting and to consider the legislative changes required to provide for a suitable transparent e-counting process,” the Commission said in its report.

“We believe that there are considerable risks in undertaking a large scale e-counting exercise in the absence of such a national framework and that the current cost-benefit analysis by GLRO does not sufficiently fill the gap created by this absence,” it added.