[E-voting] E-voting/e-counting chaos in scotland (fwd)

[Catherine Ansbro]

 From the description of the layout-related counting problems (people 
using numbers instead of X and vice-versa), perhaps many of these would 
not have been spoiled if they had been counted by hand right from the 
start.  E.g., an X instead of a 1 would have been clear at least for a 
first-preference vote--I don't know what the Scottish rules are 
regarding counting votes where the intent was clear.  Same if someone 
had used a 1 instead of an X.

Have there been no more recent stories describing the nature of the 
spoiled ballots?  Is anyone in the UK looking into this?

Catherine

Dr J Pelan wrote:
> I dropped the CC off this by accident.
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Date: Tue, 15 May 2007 16:15:38 +0100 (BST)
> From: Dr J Pelan <johnp at gatsby.ucl.ac.uk>
> Subject: Re: [E-voting] E-voting/e-counting chaos in scotland
>
> On Tue, 15 May 2007, Louise Ferguson wrote:
>
>   
>> Check the figures on spoiled ballots, undervoting, etc etc., inc. for 
>> the different years concerned.  All the data *that was collected* 
>> (though they admitted at the time that they had failed to collect other 
>> important data) is publicly available on their website, and has been 
>> since 2004. Compare with data coming out of Scotland and elsewhere, as 
>> well as other elections.
>>     
>
> How do you attribute all the problems to the e-counting ? There was an 
> issue with the barcodes but the bulk of the issues were not related to 
> e-counting per se. In particular, the spoilt ballots were due to voter 
> confusion.
>
>   
>> No, but the quotes from people like Jon Snow (well-known newscaster), 
>> there and in other news media (e.g. The Guardian), were genuine.
>>     
>
> >From memory, the problems that were cited by Jon Snow were do to with the 
> postal votes and the ballot lay-out and not e-counting. 
>
> --
> John P.
>
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