London Elects admits: we failed to add up all the votes

A letter has gone out today from Anthony Meyer, the Greater London Returning Officer, providing further details of the London election results. In it he admits that the Mayor result as declared at the time was inaccurate, as not all the valid votes were included in it:

The Mayoral 1st and 2nd preference figures for two ballot boxes from Merton and Wandsworth did not transmit successfully to City Hall for aggregation into the London-wide Mayoral declaration. Only the data on rejected ballot papers were received.

In total, 746 votes for Ken Livingstone or Boris Johnson were therefore missed out from the final figures. Of course, this doesn’t cast any doubt on Boris Johnson’s victory, but it does show – once again – how fragile electronic counting systems are in the UK and how adequate cross-checks to ensure that no data goes astray are frequently missing from the system.

Credit is due to the London Elects team for having made public their discovery of the error, but we should perhaps all be breathing a sigh of relief that the votes from only two ballot boxes went missing, and in an election that didn’t end on a knife-edge. Imagine the situation we would be in if either of these weren’t the case.

9 Comments to “London Elects admits: we failed to add up all the votes”

• Paul Hulbert Says:
  13th May 2008 at 7:57 pm

  > Imagine the situation we would be in if either of these weren’t the case

  Ummm… London twinned with Florida?

• Tristan Mills Says:
  13th May 2008 at 9:54 pm

  In this case I’m not sure its necessarily the fault of electronic voting but a systems failure which could have happened with a hand count.
  Full credit for them to acknowledge the error, and I hope that the mistake will be avoided.

  The major concerns of electronic voting are when there is no paper trail and it is not possible to verify votes.

  With the system used in London it is possible to do a hand count if necessary and human scrutiny of uncertain ballot papers is used.

• Duncan Borrowman Says:
  14th May 2008 at 11:55 am

  No Tristan. The major concern is that there is no effective audit and cross checking to highlight that any verification is correct. Ballot papers get thrown in a box at one end, and a result drops out of the other. This should not have been allowed to happen.

• Chris Paul Says:
  14th May 2008 at 12:20 pm

  Perhaps you could follow the Lib Dem precedent and call for the whole thing to be re-run? Even though this error made no difference to the result?

• Duncan Borrowman Says:
  14th May 2008 at 1:55 pm

  Anthony Meyer was a Tory MP – Anthony Mayer was the Returning Officer/GLA Chief Executive.

• Benjamin Says:
  14th May 2008 at 1:56 pm

  Are they actually no relation?

• Noorderling Says:
  14th May 2008 at 2:20 pm

  I blame John Leech

• David Boothroyd Says:
  15th May 2008 at 11:31 am

  Minor cockups like this can happen – note the Scottish devolution referendum of 1997, and compare the total number of votes in Fife on the first and second questions. There are just under 2,000 more votes recorded on the second question.

• Tim Roll-Pickering Says:
  15th May 2008 at 6:52 pm

  Surely then the real problem is when you count votes at separate locations and transmit the results, rather than counting at a single site?