UK: Review under way on voting chaos

[muriel_volestrangler]

The polls have been hit by major problems with seven counts suspended and up to 100,000 ballot papers spoilt.

Technical failures, confusion about how to fill in ballot papers and problems with postal votes have all been blamed.
...
"It is important that they look as a matter of urgency into delays in postal ballots, the high number of spoiled ballot papers, and the performance of the electronic counting machines."

A commission spokeswoman said she could not comment on whether the election would have to be re-run.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/6623287.stm

The Scottish version of the butterfly ballot. Note the BBC has changed their link to the pictures of filling out a ballot to the slightly sarcastic "How you {should have} voted".

[TheBaldyMan]

1. STV is a mess, it has to be verified by hand across every constituency.

I must confess I didn't know that Scots were using that system this time around but it seems that these problems are very similar to the London elections for local authorities and the London mayor. A novel voting system introduced with another an existing different voting system alongside.

One of the things that bothers me is the machine counting. It has to be checked by hand counts of statistical samples, the crazy thing is the council results are so paultry (a few thousand votes) that you have to count a large proportion of the ballots by hand anyway. So why not go for a simpler system and count by hand? :shrug: The English results were done and dusted bar the recounts when the first reports of 'technical difficulties' started to come in from Scotland. Brian Taylor, BBC Scotland's political editor (Nick McRobertson if you will) had http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/election07/scotland/">a live blog that shows the updates through the night. At the time his comments were far stronger.

The STV machine count is so opaque that it must be hand verified in EVERY ward, this negates any advantage of machine counting. The contract has been given to a private company, have they made the code available for public scrutiny?

As soon as I saw the STV advisory leaflet (http://www.votescotland.com/stv/How_STV_Works.pdf">downloaded it here) the first thing that struck me was how easy it could be to fiddle the figures, once those results are scanned into the machine the machine will 'phone home' and then 'home' apparently OK's the result! Why aren't all the local council results scanned and counted in situ? Surely the amount of computer power needed isn't so great that you need to get Deep Thought to process your data for you.

The whole thing stinks to high heaven.

[Febble]

3. Well, I like the idea of STV in principle

but the more complicated the ballot, the harder it seems to be to count transparently, wouldn't you say?

[TheBaldyMan]

4. transparency comes from openness not commercial secrecy

or rather using commercial 'confidentiality' as an excuse to keep the process secret. In Australia the whole e-voting controversy was avoided because the went for open systems for the electoral software, all code was made publicly available for everyone to inspect.

Read Kim Zetter's http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2003/11/61045">article on the subject at wired.com

In 1999, the Australian Capital Territory Electoral Commission put out a public call for e-vote proposals to see if an electronic option was viable. Over 15 proposals came in, but only one offered an open-source solution. Two companies proposed the plan in partnership after extensive consultation with academics at Australian National University. But one of the companies later dropped out of the project, leaving Software Improvements to build the system.

<the electoral commissioner for the Aus.Cap.Terr.> Green said that going the open-source route was an obvious choice.

"We'd been watching what had happened in America (in 2000), and we were wary of using proprietary software that no one was allowed to see," he said. "We were very keen for the whole process to be transparent so that everyone -- particularly the political parties and the candidates, but also the world at large -- could be satisfied that the software was actually doing what it was meant to be doing."

Compare this to DRC in the Scottish elections or Diebold in the US. The contrast couldn't be starker. In those cases the only way to check commercial software that is being protected from public scrutiny using intellectual property or commercial confidentiality grounds is to check the votes by hand. So why use electronic voting? STV has been hand-counted in Ulster for years. Yes it's more expensive and you have to wait for the results but you avoid all the troublesome black-box problems of e-voting on proprietary software. Perhaps the problem is not with STV as an idea but the manner that the votes are counted, the ease with which the votes cast can be doctored certainly give rise to serious concerns..

How can we make sure everyone's vote is counted and counted fairly? New Laboour and Douglas Alexander (minister responsible for the election fiasco) did know in advance that there was likely to be chaos, rather than admit the problem and take the recommended steps to avoid confusion NL simply brushed objections aside, declared all was well, now we have the result from last night. 4.5% spoiled ballots in a very close election. That is not acceptable, usually spoiled ballots are a far lower proportion of the ballots cast.

We can count all the votes fairly and openly. That certainly wasn't done last night.

(on edit)Check out http://www.wired.com/politics/security/news/2004/01/61968?currentPage=1">this connected story from wired.com at the end computer expert Ms. Mercuri states the need for a hand check of the result using paper ballots for all electronic voting.

[Febble]

5. Well, I agree

But I've just been talking to my father who voted yesterday, and he said he was just totally confused by the ballot. He had to ask for help. He's 80, but not stupid (he was a GP and an anaesthetist). And a lot of the chaos seems to have been in physically transporting the ballots. The whole thing seems to have been complete chaos. Transparent software is essential of course, but the problems go well beyond the software! As in US election problems of course.

[TheBaldyMan]

6. There were also irregularities with postal ballots as well

the whole affair seems to have been badly handled, it casts a pall over the result. I suppose the only thing that's left is to wait for the electoral commission to release their preliminary findings. It is inexcusable for things to have gone so badly wrong. There were many indicators for everything that did go wrong (with the possible exception of engine failure).

The lessons learned from the many pilot schemes for evoting, postal ballots etc. seem to have been ignored.

[Febble]

2. Guardian coverage here:

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/localgovernment/story/0,,2072698,00.html
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/localgovernment/story/0,,2072877,00.html

The election used Single Transferable Vote - much more complicated than we Brits are used to!

And of course that's why optical scanners were brought in.

[Votergater]

7. But we also just had ES&S count our votes electronically too...

And this week began to use Internet Voting with no accountable record of the votes cast whatsoever. Is the British government insane?

[Bill Bored]

8. This is what the Brits get for hanging out in FLORIDA so much! nt

[Febble]

9. Scots, not Brits in general

No problems in England (apart from a crap government of course). I voted as usual on a paper ballot with a pencil. No queue (we were the only two there). Three councillors to be selected from a choice of nine, each marked by party. Three crosses in three boxes.

[mod mom]

10. UK Telegraph: If You Can't Even Run an Election

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/05/04/nelections904.xml

If you can't even run an election ...
By Simon Heffer
Last Updated: 6:11am BST 05/05/2007

They used to say in Northern Ireland "vote early, vote often".
In Scotland many people are wondering whether they have actually managed to vote at all.
That perhaps 100,000 votes - a considerable number out of a small electorate and even smaller turnout - were spoiled because people could not comprehend the voting system and work out how to mark the ballot paper properly is a shocking indictment of Labour's electoral management.
Had this happened in the third world, there would be calls for the election to be re-run: and they would be hard to dispute.

[TheBaldyMan]

13. Simon Heffer is a tory with an axe to grind, I wouldn't pay too much heed

to what he has to say on the subject.

It's an opportunity to bash non-conservatives so he'll jump at the chance. I'd recommend the http://www.theherald.co.uk/">Glasgow Herald or http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/default.stm">BBC Scotland's coverage for a fairer treatment. They are not very pleased at all, they just have a less partisan outlook.

[Einsteinia]

11. feedback welcome on this anti-VBM brochure

http://www.califelectprotect.net/a_b/VotebyMailorDemocracy.pdf

[muriel_volestrangler]

12. Labour to challenge poll result

THE Labour party is planning to snatch electoral victory from the Nationalists by preparing a legal challenge over a Holyrood seat which the SNP won by a handful of votes.

Labour party lawyers are planning to contest the result in Cunninghame North, which the Nationalists won by just 48 votes, giving them a one-seat victory.

But with an estimated 1,000 spoiled ballot papers having been declared at the count, and amid allegations of missing ballot papers, the party has begun moves to have the entire election reviewed and, if necessary, taken to an Electoral Court.

Labour party managers in the constituency have also written to the count's returning officer to demand that all the spoiled ballot papers be made publicly available and re-examined.

http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/politics.cfm?id=701072007

The SNP got 47 seats in the parliament; Labour got 46. So if just one seat changes hands, this would change who is the largest party - and thus who might form the executive (according to an election expert at the bottom of the article, any change in this constituency's votes won't be enough to affect the regional list numbers).

And talking of AMS:

Martin added: "A lot of people saw the Scottish Labour party on the regional list and thought to themselves that they were voting for Allan Wilson. People were so confused. So many of them voted on the regional list but left the constituency one blank."

The failure to mark the constituency vote is now being seen as the main reason for the staggering number of spoiled ballot papers which were recorded. As many as 100,000 votes were not recorded, out of the electorate of just over two million.

It seems to me it's valid to vote in the regional list but not the constituency list (for instance, some parties only stood in the regional lists; if you like them, but no-one else, you should have the right to vote only in the regional list). If the quote from Scotland on Sunday is correct, I'm not at all surprised there were a lot of 'spoiled' ballots in the constituency counts - but they could reflect a genuine decision by a voter - and one that has to be expressed that way.

There was an American poll observer, who said he thought the parties most likely to have been hit by the spoiled ballots were the small parties (eg SSP and Solidarity, neither of whom got any MSPs elected, unlike previous elections), who depend on the regional list to get their candidates elected. It would be good to know the proportions of 'spoiled' ballots divided up into the different categories.