Money wasted on electronic counting of votes in London Elections

On 15th July we published our detailed report on the lack of transparency and the possibility of outright cheating taking place as a result of the votes cast in the recent London Mayor and Assembly Elections being electronically counted.

Our report also showed that it took three times longer to count the votes electronically than if it had been done manually (even though London Elects falsely claimed it would be the other way round and three times quicker!) Now we find that counting votes electronically is much more costly than the traditional method of manually counting votes.

A report by the new Mayor of London’s Forensic Audit Panel, was published on 15th July. The Forensic Audit Panel was tasked to “investigate financial management and controls at the London Development Agency and the Greater London Authority.” One of the areas it looked at was the cost of the recent London –wide elections. This was the finding:

“the cost of the 2008 election was in excess of £18 million. The likely budget for 2012 is therefore in the region of £20 million. Based on the average cost of one of the larger London borough’s local elections in 2004, after some indexing to 2012 prices, the aggregate cost across the 32 London boroughs is less than £15 million. Even without allowing for economies of scale, savings of up to £1 million per annum in the form of reduced contributions to reserves are we believe a realistic target in this area. The view of the potential lack of value for money of the current arrangements was supported by a recent independent report of the 2008 elections (report of the Open Rights Group which was accredited by the Electoral Commission).”

In other words, according to the Forensic Audit Panel when the next set of elections take place in 2012, it would cost at least £5 million less to do a manual count than an electronic count.

The Open Rights Group’s report was published on 2nd July. It makes interesting reading and can be found here .

The Open Rights Group’s findings were discussed in our own report published on this site on 15th July. Shockingly the Open Rights Group concluded: “there is insufficient evidence available to allow independent observers to state reliably whether the results declared in the May 2008 elections for the Mayor of London and the London Assembly are an accurate representation of voters’ intentions.”

With respect to the cost of the election, the Open Rights Group’s findings are somewhat at variance with those of the Forensic Audit Panel, and actually shown that the Forensic Audit Panel drastically underestimates the true likely cost in 2012, if electronic counting is persisted with.

On the costs in 2008 the Open Rights Group reports:

“London Elects has estimated the cost of the May 2008 elections at around £19 million. Of this, £12 million goes direct to the London boroughs and £7 million is allocated to central costs; the Indra (the company who supplied the electronic counting software) contract represents £4.5 million of this £7 million. The £4.5 million figure is provisional — at ORG‘s meeting with London Elects on 28 May 2008 ORG was told that it was likely to increase and that final costs would not be known until around 18 months after the election.

So the 2008 cost was provisionally £19 million but would go up – not the £18 million declared by the Forensic Audit Panel. This implies the 2012 cost is likely to be around £22 million and mean that a manual count would be around £7 million cheaper.

It takes longer, costs more and removes any possibility of transparency in the process. So why would anyone wish to persist with electronic counting?

Any suggestions?

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