London Mayoral vote can't be verified due to e-voting irregularities
Link (Thanks, Glyn!)
The Open Rights Group's report into e-counting of votes cast in the London Elections is out today. The report finds that:"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."
Votes for London Mayor and the 25 member London Assembly were counted electronically, and overall the election was well-managed by the independent body set up to run elections in London, London Elects.
However, transparency around the recording of valid votes was a major issue, leading many of our team of 27 official observers to conclude that they were unable to observe votes being counted. And while hundreds of screens set up by vote scanners showed almost meaningless data to observers, London Elects admit that the system was likely to be recording blank ballots as valid votes.
The report also details how London Elects are unable to publish an audit, commissioned from KPMG, of some of the software used to count the London vote, because of disputes over commercial confidentiality. The situation highlights the problems that arise when the very public function of running elections is mixed with issues of commercial confidentiality and proprietary software. In the context of a public election, it is unacceptable that these issues should preclude the publication of the KPMG audit.
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Back in the 70s, we would have chanted,
From London to Harare!
The struggle is the same!
It really is about who counts the votes.
The real problem is that the laser printer at London Elects is all tied up - someone on the network has the RSS feed for the Violet Blue thread overriding the printer queue.
To clarify, the counting of the _paper_ ballots was electronic - not the casting of ballots.
In any case, still disturbing.
I voted, and was disappointed to see how few other people did, given the size of the population in London.
The voter turnout didn't do much to dispel the idea that people in the UK enoy being ruled by a small unrepresentative elite (Labour, Conservative, elected or otherwise)
Ummm... after seeing the error message, I'd like to ask a question...
Is this e-voting system storing its data in Microsoft Access?
I'm looking at the "dbo.[table name]" part of the message, which, I think, is pretty common in MSAccess databases - I think that "dbo" is the default name for a database, and few people who use Access as a design tool get around to changing the name. By contrast, I don't think this acronym is common among databases managed with SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, etc. I think DBAs usually create databases in these systems with SQL (e.g., "create database [name]") or are queried for a name by the system, and it would be awfully coincidental to have chosen "dbo" as the name.
Professional DBAs, am I correct?
If I am... am I correct in being kind of horrified that a notoriously unsecure, concurrent-access-intolerant, and remarkably amateurish system is used to store live voting data? Wouldn't this be like writing national-security identity-verifying apps in Visual Basic?
David Stein, there's more info on the errors (including others) in the article. It might give you more information.
Actually "dbo" is the default schema for more than one Microsoft database product, including SQL Server. I'm guessing that is the software being used. I took a quick look at article, but couldn't confirm this.
The US can't find a suitable way to cast votes and an idiot is elected...London can't find a suitable way to cast votes and an idiot is elected!