I’ve already blogged about how London Elects admitted to failing to count all the votes in the London Mayor election. Now looking through the detailed figures I see that Lambeth has sprouted two extra wards.
What seems to have happened is that some, but only some, of the ballot boxes in Brixton Hill and Thornton wards were reported in to the central number crunching venue in City Hall with typos in their names – and so the official results have votes for both Brixton Hill and Brxiton Hill (note the x and i) and also both Thornton and Thirnton (note the third letter).
Not a huge difference you might think, but what it highlights (again) is the weakness of the cross-checking and auditing process. What these errors means is that the total number of wards included in the official figures is wrong – and you would have expected something like “have we got the right number of wards here?” to feature in any auditing rules.
7 Comments
Don’t matter how many wards you want to invent it was stil a total LD wipeout!!
London Elects seems to have paid no attention to what the London Assembly told them they should in December of last year.
You can see the Assembly’s report here: -http://www.london.gov.uk/assembly/reports/elections.jsp
Time for the London Elects officers to appear before the Assembly and explain themselves methinks.
I noticed that some wards in Bexley and Bromley have the wrong names (though no errors in duplication as far as I can see). Time for the Election Commission to fall on the organisation of electronic counts and the audit processses like a ton of bricks!
http://results.londonelects.org.uk/Results/xls/10_lambeth_southwark.xls
Eh? I see no “Brxiton” or “Thirnton”.
The figures were corrected by London Elects late this afternoon.
But the figures were right in this case? Just some spolling mistakes?
Unfortunately in Lib Dem Liverpool the sort of counting mistakes we get are the ones of the Lib Dems bollocksing up the budgets, again. £61M of cuts is it? 4% rise in Tax is it?
Let’s hear more about Lib Dem counting errors like those!
Is Chris Paul really stupid, or is it all show?
The question is, with these errors does it mean that there was not a proper audit process?