Campaign for a Shorter, Cheaper, More Accurate Election Night
All the pro-politics political junkies are getting worked up about the idea that vote counting and results might be delayed until the next day (Friday) after the election. They like all the drama. What a waste of money and time. Lets save all the hassle, save all the cost, get the result accurate and in a timely fashion by having an electronic count. Election night will be saved, and it will all be done on the night with the result will be known the minute the polls close.
It is the 21st Century, we don’t need rooms full of people miscounting the vote, lets go digital and get it over with by 10.01. The night would be for celebration, commiseration and sleeping, rather than voter slip counting into the early hours…
Dale, Isaby, Harris and Pickles just like the drama. The rest of us just want the result, the faster the better…
Bring it on, I would support digital
Too open to fraud, and Labour Centeral should know all about that. Perhaps that iaccounts for their support.
I would rather trust to recounts than the digital fraudsters.
Electronic voting leaves too much scope for fraud – bits of paper, properly marked, counted in public immediately the polls close and kept for a year afterwards are an essential safeguard of democracy. We should do away with on-demand postal voting too. Voters should vote personally as far as possible, with identity checks when registering and when voting.
Excellent points. Let’s return to the 1950s when all party members and counters were kept outside of the polling station, well away from the buidling, and in the rain. (Colchester’s Returing Officer please note this next time for the polling station located in the Town Hall!)
Agreed mostly. Postal votes are the weakness – When party workers collect them (to check) submit; When the head of the household collects them and takes them to the iman to ask how to fill them in; When the house contains a dozen non-existent voters.
Identity check at voting should simply satisfy the polling station supervisor that you probably are who you claim to be – A national ID card would not be required; just enough proof to satisfy him that you probably are “John Smith”; because he knows you personally or you produce any of the usual documents that also pass as proof of identity or enough correlating documents/letters/etc.
Finally – your identity could also be vouched for by any person that fully proves their identity and “signs” (under pain of penalty) that you are who you say you are.
‘kept for a year’ … Didn’t I read that the votes from Glenrothes had mysteriously disappeared ?
Anyone that thinks electronic counting can be done safely without risking fraud on a massive scale is a blind idiot!
Once you rely on a piece of software to tally the vote, you lose ALL accountability and traceability.
The only way to be sure that your vote as cast is counted, is for that vote to physically transported to a count and for it to be counted fairly by a person in full view of the public and candidates. Any point where a vote is moved out of sight, there is a risk of fraud. The stakes are far to high to allow that to happen.
There is masses of evidence, amased and confessed by engineers who worked for the company formerly called diebold, that there voting machines were ridiculously easy to hack. The results effectively meaningless and without the confidence of users.
Several universities ran tests on the software and the hardware and found problems with both that would allow hacking to occur in order to alter the result of the vote.
We must NEVER have electronic voting or counting in this country. NEVER!
Democracy would end with the click of a mouse!
Hear hear! Look at the experience in the States, for example – c.f. e.g. slashdot passim.
It’s expensive, it’s open to fraud, and it’s not a problem. Counting by hand is simple, cost effective, easily checked and verified by partisan or independent observers. As for the time it takes…most people just go to bed and get the result in the morning news.
And if you’re such a political junkie that you need to stay up and watch it, then surely that’s part of the fun. You’re not going to argue to shorten the Grand National to one jump, or X-factor to just the final, are you?
@Lil Olmey, no. 132:
The thing that went missing in Glenrothes was the ‘marked register’ – essential for checking to see who voted and who didn’t – necessary to spot ‘dead’ voters etc.
The ‘marked register’ could of course be recreated by going through all the ballot papers – the voter number should be written on the back of each paper. Don’t know why they haven’t done this – other than that it’s obviously onerous and would require a court order! (This of course belies the fact that our votes are supposedly secret. As if!).
Guido……. 46 comments in and this suggestion has dive bombed. Not often you are out of tune with your readers.
Bovvered.
Oh, you luddites. Guido is absolutely right. Our european neighbours have been using computer voting for years now without any scandal. It’s not voting via Internet – you go to a polling station and use a computer screen ballot paper. Results ready immediately and LESS chance of ballot stuffing because of elaborate security software. UK is in the Stone Age.
re 77, The open rights group report on trials here was scathing.
Acj Ja!!
You are too trusting (or naive) by far, Herr Fawkes. Give me 10 minuten und ein decent broadband connection und I could win the vote for ze Monster Raving Loony Party, let alone ze National Socialist Party.
Triumph Acclaim!!
Remembering the success of other Government IT projects, especially this one’s, and I think you could plan on something going wrong.
Funnily enough the Mercan voting machines in Florida were suspect in 2000 weren’t they and I bet penny to a pound seeing El Gordon is in love with everything American the self same voting machines or similar would be bought, stick to what is proved to work, closely check postal votes, jump hard on offenders (permanantly lose their vote) and count the votes the following morning and enquiries made into discrepencies in the number of votes cast. Rant over
@Lil Olmey, no. 132:
The thing that went missing in Glenrothes was the ‘marked register’ – essential for checking to see who voted and who didn’t – necessary to spot ‘dead’ voters etc.
The ‘marked register’ could of course be recreated by going through all the ballot papers – the voter number should be written on the back of each paper. Don’t know why they haven’t done this – other than that it’s obviously onerous and would require a court order! (This of course belies the fact that our votes are supposedly secret. As if!).
I would as well if you could absolutely guarantee that it would work. As the system would probably be controlled by the government (or at least a government-like entity), I can’t imagine that it would.
This method was how Bush 2 stole Florida back in 2000 wasn’t it? Give me paper any day. However quickly (or not) the vote result is announced, the likes of Peter Snow will still be bathering on about it for days anyway.
Chad? Hanging’s too good for him! Bastard!
What is “Pyada”?
It’s “ПPАBДA”
Fuckwit.
No, but it is how the republicans stole Ohio in 2004. Thanks to Diebold and ES&S voting systems. Both systems voting machines ran proprietary software (compiled source code kept secret) that counted the votes in complete secrecy… The public had to trust that votes cast were counted accurately. It was possible for the software to flip votes without anyone being able to prove it at all. Nobody outside of those corporations knows if they did or not, because the software was never examined at code level.
There were many examples of people pressing the screens to vote for one candidate and the computer registering a vote for another candidate. In one county the republicans got more votes than there were voters.
Universties found that the systems failed at many points along the chain. From registering votes for the wrong candidate, to the ability to hack the access database that tallied the votes at the the voting machine, to being able to do likewise to the database on the central tabulating machines, to keys opening any machine to allow easy access to the flash drives, to the modems used to connect voting stations to central tabulators being easy to hack, to the master memory cards holding the results to be pre-loaded with results. There was a whole raft of areas where the result of the vote COULD have been tampered with.
Why should people have to trust a private corporation (whose chairmen were registered republicans who publicly pledged to deliver the vote to the republicans) who wrote code that was proprietary, compiled and counted in secret and left NO AUDITABLE TRAIL whatsoever?
In our old, slow system, our physical votes, un-changed and un-tampered are but in a locked box, transported to the count and then openly and publicly counted in front of the candidates, they can be re-counted and there is a full audit trail. You lose all this with electronic voting.
Hand counting is a system that does the job. it delivers. sure it is slow. GOOD! it makes for more suspense and provides moments of joy as the public gets to revel in the descent and humiliation of former MP’s and Ministers as they are very publicly sacked.
It is a time-tested and wonderful system. It is simple and it works and it is seen to work. It is one of the very very few parts of our democracy that does work. The current seating boundries don’t as they give labour more than a 40 seat majority without a vote being cast! let’s not give labour any more votes through making massive vote fraud even easier!
Hand counting works. It just does. properly!
if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
It would be ver easy to administer, just a quck print off, could be done by one trusted person, we could even get PM Brown to do it, it would then not be subject the usual hoo haa of mis-counts etc
I’m a left wing liberal gordon brown lover (not really – I HATE Brown). I’m also a software developer. Do you really want me writing software to count your vote? I could easily make a small “mistake” somewhere in code and lose the odd vote here and there…..
Can you organise ‘family ‘ postal votes, for all those happy asian chappies who are labour councilors in the Midlands ?
Easy. a VERY rough quick example of a code snippet to how to increment labour’s vote by one count for every 15 votes cast and reduce conservative votes by one. reducing the tories 15% point lead by enough to give labour a working majority if not a greater number of votes in total.
Note, if labour gets 500,000 fewer votes than the tories, they could still win a working majority owing to the massive built-in bias in the seating boundries.
// initialise the count for each party
$Conservative = 0;
$Labour = 0;
$Liberal_Democrat = 0;
$total_count = 0;
etc…
// get the votes
while $votes { // while there are votes, loop through them counting.
$vote = $_get['vote_cast[$total_count]‘]; // count the vote
// increment the tally for the appropriate party:
if ($vote == “Conservative”) { $Conservative++; }
if ($vote == “Labour”) { $Labour++; }
if ($vote == “Liberal Democrat”) { $Liberal_Democrat++; }
if ($total_count mod 15) { // every 15 votes counted
$Conserative–; // decrement one vote for conservative
$labour++; // add a vote to labour instead.
}
$total_count++; // increment the total count of votes.
}
now to cover up the vote rigging, I would use Diebold’s trick of using two tables. One to count the total votes cast, (but not tallying the votes for each party) but recording which voter voted for whom (for the audit trail) and the second table would tally the votes for each party, but not link the votes to people who voted. it is the second vote table that would decide the outcome. It would then be simple write secret code to switch votes on the second table. Comparing the total votes cast on both tables would show the same number of votes cast. One could find any voter and accurately establish who they voted for in table one, and table two would tally the totals for the parties so that no matter how many votes were flipped, the two tables would always tally.
Unlike diebold. I would not use an access database, I would write a proprietary database that would compile at runtime and remain encrypted.
Election fraud is so easy with new computermybob. simples!
Who would run though? I would trust guy tv but…
Ah but it is great to see the tears and gritted teeth congratulations
Agree with you Grytpype. Those wonderful Portillo moments would be lost forever. I’m hoping to see it happen to Balls …… and Bercow for that matter
Absolutement! Won’t have time to warm the brandy and enjoy the cigar if it’s all over by 10.01. The whole point of sitting up through the night is the increasing sense of schadenfreude and the moment when Gordoom shows up broken and beaten, squinting in the glare of the TV lights denying that he has lost and shouting that he is “getting on with the job” as the men in white coats lead him away stage left.
I’ll be delighted to stay up all night watching one miserable Nulab bastard after another being slung out – don’t deprive me of that Guido…..!!
So a corrupt party could easily forge the result by the stroke of a few keys on the computer.
Too trusting I say
“They” need the few hours overnight and under the cover of darkness to stuff the ballot boxes with the result that “they” want.
no need… they can just post them in nowadays anyway, or even simpler just pay the local imam to watch over their customers to ensure the right vote is put.
unless they are expecting a post strike?
A nice idea, Guido, but what do you do when the system crashes?
Tic Tac Toe or coin toss??????
Fight in the car park.
Right. You’re on.
Outside in 10 minutes…
I’ll ‘ave yer. I’ll ‘aver yer.
Where’s me pies?
B*gger, I can’t even spell…!
No change there then, you fat pie-stuffed illiterate tosser.
I’ll take you all on. You’re me best mate pal. Bleeeuuurrrgggggg.
Get fookin’ pies out, John!
What about the risk of manipulation by whichever “big business close to the governing party” happens to get the contract to count the votes?
A billion to develop the system, a renegotiation half way through as the costs have escalated and still not ready in 20 years as the computer developers have not allowed the operating system to be licensed to the UK Government.
You’ve got it !!!
We enhance the NHS system so that everybody has to visit their local hospital (if there is one) – have a DNA check – and get a mental check up to see if they are sane enough to vote!
There’s Simple for you !
…….and we could remove their breeding equipment at the same time
Bloody marvelous mes enfants
It gets better – we are nealry there Guido !!
It could also be open to absent voters ie those that are registered (much like the DWP benefit registered) and then they could vote over the internet from their overseas homes.
I wonder if the Census would pick up on the 120 million then living in the UK and wonder if their 61 million figure is wrong??????
But will they have enough time to modify the postal voting and lose the voting register.
…but what about all the cool graphics , swingometers and endless speculation, pontification etc
Why is voting on a Thursday? Is it so the election doesn’t spoil the weekends for our politicians?
Many moons ago, before the homogenisation of Britain began, Thursdays in towns and villages across the nation had always traditionally been half day closing days. This was to allow village shops and other businesses time to restock before the Friday/Saturday rush.
Voting on a Thursday gave the population something to do when they couldn’t go shopping.
It means that on a Friday night all MPs get pissed on expenses to either
(a) celebrate with fellow MPs
(b) commiserate with fellow ex-MPs
Agreed. The number one thing they could do for democracy is move election days to Sundays (and force the shops to close as well).
Electronic voting would be great in principle, however in practice they’d give the contract to run it to Crapita or EDS, and it would be a monumental fuck-up.
What a strange view you have of the relationship between the people and the government they own.
We vote on a Thursday “because we’ve always voted on a Thursday”. Most countries seem to do it on a Sunday.
Saturdays here mate. Seems to work well enough.
We couldn’t have it on a Friday because all the mooslims will be moaning.
If I play my cards right, I’m doing other things on a Sunday.
Where do I vote in favour of such a campaign?
Put your X on a £20 note and send it to G Brown !0 Downing Street SW1
You would not see that again mush!
Too many problems with the electronic idea.
Where do I vote in favour of electronic vote counting?
Would this vote be counted electronically?
Also if you had an id card you could use it to give you access to the voting machine.
Ok just jesting,runs for his coat as the knives start getting thrown.
please don’t suggest things like that when we have such a control-freak in No10
More scope for fraud and cock-up – No thanks !!
They’ll all be ‘postal votes’ registered by Mandy !!
Guido, that would be great. Unfortunately the system required to carry out the work would be a government IT system and we all know how well that works out. They struggle with the pencil, paper x interface so they stand no chance of producing and effective IT system
I think it would only work if we had some sort of check to stop people voting twice
I think in Africa and Afghanistan they have the blue finger dye, we could have a nice turmeric chutney that would stain it a pleasant saffron colour
You could always chop a finger off. That would at least provide a theoretical upper limit to the amount of fraud (and a powerful disincentive to repeat voting).
Mind you, it would be difficult to vote in more than 10 elections in a life time (and it might result in record low turnouts!).
If everyone had a bar code tattooed on our heads, they could be scanned as they cast theirr vote. That way we could eliminate election fraud forever.
Would siamese twins have two votes or one. I’m confused
Chop too many fingers off & we’d be even further under the Government’s thumb ..
There is too much at stake to not have physical verification.
Electronic voting can always be manipulated.
Do not go there, I don’t trust the government enough too beleive they would never interfere
I don’t trust any politician of any hue.
But isn’t that too easy and cheap?
surely all things Members of parliament have to be expensive and awkward.
Not fogetting all those liberal party workers who earn a packet counting the votes on election night will be out of pocket.
They earn extra for dumping B and P votes.
LOL, No way!
You obviously haven’t followed all the electronic vote-rigging scandals in the US.
There MUST be paper ballots and records.
True enough. It’s a shame that so many people seem ready to scream “conspiracy theorist” at anyone who alleges rampant vote fraud in America. They obviously have never taken the time to actually bother themselves with examining the mountains of evidence, both academic and collected to present in court, that cleary demonstrated massive intent to commit fraud. They prefer to rely on an incredibly naive and foolish faith in the “goodness and honesty” of good and decent democratic governance. Although nobody has ever managed to provide any real evidence that such a thing even exists!
Election fraud is so easy with new computermybob. simples!
No. I want an all night special in which That Twät, David Dimbleby is pinioned to a wheel of fortune for an impromptu revival of Bullseye, hosted by Jim Bowen.
And I want each and every defeated Labour monkey dragged out of the count, spray-painted blue, and released on to the motorway to run around naked until they are flattened by a TIR juggernaut.
Imagine the mess Prescott would make to the front of your car.
No problem there Charles. I’ll bring over a bl**dy great big Kenworth B-Double artic with bull bars on the front. It will make mincemeat of the fat b*stard!
Is it fitted with a video camera so we can see the look on the fat bastard’s face?
Good idea – can easily be arranged!
Good idea. Spag Bol for 10,000 anyone?
If we have a situation like the last Scottish election results which were supposedly computerised, no thanks. We’d have had quicker results using a team of blind, deaf monkeys.
Last Scottish election was a farce, and a warning. I also hated the cardboard boxes we used. Give us back the black tin boxes our grannies used! I understand not counting on the night, as people are too lazy and selfish to work the count, but still, count them by hand, and in public, under camera, and limit party workers’ participation.
Guido, you know people distrust the government, but you should be finding ways to reverse, not reinforce. We’re not talking opinion polling or market research here.
It’s the election, stupid.
Agreed about party workers. They should be allowed to fully observe all parts of the count, but should not be allowed to interfere with a single vote. Examine? Yes. Interfere? No!
Oi, leave our lads out of this!
It won’t work Guido, Susan Boyle was beaten by some skanky dance troupe in an electronic real time vote, that was obviously fixed. Gordon would never allow it anyway because Susan Lost
Here here, what a good idea. Might be worth using ballot papers just in case there’s a big I.T cock up although I’m sure there won’t be if the government are in charge….
IT procurement.
chortle.
Piss off Guido election night is a good excuse for a piss up. are you some Kill Joy wishy washy liberal or something?
Yes, please do. Shame on you Guido for suggesting such a crap-stupid idea.
You will have more time for a piss-up. As far as Guido knows they don’t have bars in counting halls.
Put vodka in your water bottle init guv
I have a fridge and a TV at home, thanks
Yes GF. But think of the fun watching the slomo car crash and individually toasting the enforced departure of each of the thieves and charlatans. And anyone who is such an anorak as to volunteer to count – well, they probably wouldn’t like an alcohol fuelled schadenfreude experience of watching Gobshite and his catamites die.
The way things stand at the moment if you had a ‘Dallas Party’ whereby you took a drink every time a Labour MPlost his seat you’d wake up dead from alcohol poisoning.
Anyway, I don’t want Labour MPs losing their seats. I want them losing their deposits.
Ah ha! I’m in a safe Tory seat but I see a goal presenting itself.
Alcohol is to be banned soon. It’s bad for you, you know.
Imagine the scene. Balls at his count. The look on his sweaty little face as the Returning Officer announces just how much he has lost by. Worth every penny of the cost of the count.
I don’t agree. Ballsatingcabbagetripe has a very large sweaty face.
In fact I think he probably has a hat size of at least 7 3/4.
Yep. I might just make the effort to go to the count.
Like you Flaccidwidger I’m aching to hear Ball’s speech after his defeat. Perhaps he’ll do a duet with the odious Cooper – neither of them being able to pronounce their Rs. I often wonder how their childwen conwerse.
We had the counting machines in Scotland 2007, it just added to the banana republic feel of the whole voting fiasco. Throw in this government organising it, and lets get the Afghans to monitor the count.
Can you imagine what McDoom will do with a vote counting maching that doesn’t give the result he wants? They are bit heavier than your average Nokia ‘phone!
Two forms of election, one new, on the same day. Utter confusion, software not showing spoiled paper as spoiled papers, 1 looking like 7, total mess
cross/mark in box – optically counted and sorted to candidate piles. Recount and check by hand (flick the pages to check for mark).
With a bit of luck he might get a hernia.
You mean introduce a system like the NHS spine.
Personally, a nice slow death, with scene after scene of the bastards being sacked is needed
Nick
That would be well dull!
But you couldn’t do it – ever.
You would need to have the machines print out a paper ballot with all of the names on it, and a minimum random 20% of these would need to be checked manually to check for discrepancies.
…and by the time the safeguards and the machines are in place, the cost would be too extravagant, especially when you’re only doing it to spoil the drama.
http://xkcd.com/463/
What and miss multitude runs of that “Portillo” moment when the returning officers announces the the results of NuLabs demise.
I think we should stick to the old fashion way, yes going digital might provide efficiency in the process but computers can go wrong, it’s only a matter of time until it malfunctioned and some crazy lefty accuses the system of failing.
Too open to fraud, and I’d also prefer labour to suffer with hours of “christ, are we really as fucked as it looks like with those piles of papers?” anxiety. And I’d also like hours and hours of Sky News interviewing labour soon-to-be-ExMPs asking “how does it feel to be this hated? are you sorry at all for screwing up the whole country so much?”
I’m looking forward to election night, not just because labour will have to eat humble shit, but also because the BBC won’t be able to spin it and they know that they’ll be next in the voters’ “fuck them all; take away their job and their money and let them eat shit” plan.
Couldn’t put it better myself.
Oh yes. What joy. All those Labour cabinet ministers standing on platforms all over the country trying to show they don’t care that they’ve been dumped.
Adam boulton won’t be gloating, dirty trot.
Stupid boy !!!
Guido – get a grip. You carry the ORG logo. Check out the excellent ORG brief on e-voting and e-counting at http://wiki.openrightsgroup.org/wiki/E-voting
I’ve gone now to walk me dog on the moors – carry on !!
Twit !
Twoo!
I’m back now – did I miss something!
Hi Guido,
From a democratic perspective Electronic Voting is a really bad idea – there is just too much scope for fraud and fuckups. They simply can’t be trusted.
There’s a good intro by Ed Felten (a noted security expert) on YouTube at:
…it’s a really useful for people who want to dig into the topic; see also:
…for a video review, and more comentary from Matt Blaze (another leading security geek) at http://www.crypto.com/blog/vote_fraud_in_kentucky/
Did you not SEE how badly this went in Scotland in 2007? A horrendous idea which will undoubtedly fuel fears of a stitch up by the ruling party.
Perhaps it would be better if we adopted the Libyan voting system , it’s more compassionate and has more humanity.
There’s no need to do all this counting palaver.
There is no way you could make an electronic system at all transparent, so it would always be acused (and most likely guilty) of being rigged. Especially with such government friends as Accenture and the like involved – no doubt Diebold could bid too.
The only sensible way of settling a result is a multi-way duel to the death – the winner is the last one left alive (and they are immediately arrested and imprisoned – see there is no down side to this).
Wasnt Paddy Ashdown some sort of commando ninja?
Not sure I like that plan
I believe he was something of a swordsman alright.
He served as an officer in the SBS.
He was much admired by the men who served under him.
Or not.
So I presume he would have won the bare knuckle boxing matches in the carpark
I like the drama. I like sitting up all night watching the results come in even though the BBC does its best to spoil the occasion by telling us the result at 10pm. And there’s already far too much scope for electoral fraud without leaving the ballot boxes hanging about unattended all night.
If you really want to save time and money why bother at all? New labour obviously have no chance, the only unknown is if they will also be beaten by the party that cannot be named.
Can’t we have a Chinese Election?
Guido,
electronic voting would be quicker, but open to abuse and confusion.
I don’t trust any election result in the USA, regardless of who wins, because the systems used there are fiddled in several ways. Electronic voting machines have been rigged: with some indicating several hundred votes cast BEFORE the polls opened and other showing let’s just call them “anomalies.”
Delaying the count increases the opportunity to take a sneak peek at some ballots and fix the result by adding some for the “right” candidate. I refer you to my coverage of the Washington State governor’s election in 2004 for one of the most suspicious elections I have ever seen.
Perhaps the problem in the UK is the holding elections on a Thursday. I wonder if having them over a weekend would help (so Jews can vote on Sunday and strict Christians can do so on Saturday)? With postal or proxy votes for people who are travelling over the weekend, it should not be disruptive and polls could close at an early enough hour so the counting could be completed in most cases by 11pm.
Generally, I’d suggest copying French election procedures over those of the USA: they hold worldwide voting at polling stations in almost every country and get the result out in hours with only one solid claim of rigging (the Masstricht treaty referendum). And I think that was more naivety on the part of No campaigners (not taking the overseas territories seriously) than actual fraud.
So no Diebold machines please.
Remember what happened when they experimented with all postal voting? – Do you really think that these people could organise an Internet ballot? (could they even organise a piss-up in a brewery?)
Ever read the Aachen Memorandum?
Apart from the fact that it is spookily accurate about how life in the UK will be, a computer voting system is fiddled with (by the europhiles) in order to provide a narrow “yes” vote for full integration.
Leave the paper – a harder to fiddle audit system.
Incidentally I liked the bits about the last UK trawler being caught fishing illegally by a Spanish frigate and prison being reserved for hardened criminals like anglers and motorists.
Just give every voter a “coin” of equal weight.
Each candidate has a tin.
You put your “coin” in the candidate tin you want to vote for.
Then at the end you weigh the tins.
It would take about 1 minute.
Just make sure the vote weight tallied with the “coin” count to prevent fraud.
‘Can’ they be ‘Processed’ before going in the tin
Ok, so 200% over budget for the implementation and details of your vote left on a train a week after the election – no thanks
!”£$%^LOLOLOL^%$£”!
oh how silly, sorry peeps just had to
Diebold. Nuff said.
Sorry Guido. Paper is best.
You’ll be wanting ID cards next…
In one word Brownout – I concur – D I E B O L D. Forget it.
I say we just go all out and select politicans in a cross between x-factor and i’m a celeb get me out of here.
People seem to have such dislike to for intelligent or serious politicians anyway. They voted for Blair. They voted for Obama. They want to vote for Dave. How much more interesting Treasury vs No. 10 battles would be if it was Jordan vs Peter Andre?
Guido I like your idea and it would work if held every day but not on the bbc ‘cos I don’t trust ‘em. Let me explain:
Every one has to vote on their birthday and then all the votes are totted up electronically on say January 1st every five years. How abart it?
“Dale, Isaby, Harris and Pickles just like the drama. ”
That may well be true, but why is it a bad thing to have some drama in the process.
The flow of election nights is cathartic anyway. When the nation is as heartily sick of a government as we currently are or were of the tories in 1997, it is good for the soul to see the likes of mellor and portillo go down. It would be far less satisfying to just download a spreadsheet with all the details.
We just HAVE to watch Bercow versus Farage live!
Yes the buckingham hotels will be doing a roaring trade
I want to watch them squirm as they lose their seats with a slow build up from the returning officer.
Darling, Smith, Balls, Cooper, Clegg, for starters.
Bollocks. It’s about the only time those feather-bedded bastards in our Town Halls ever do any fucking work.
I’d do it every week if I could.
Blimey, in this day and age you would have thought they could just Twitter the result
I also want to hear “this is a terrible result for Gordon Brown and Labour.” Repeated about 400 times.
600, more like.
“this is a terrible result for Gordon Brown and Labour.”
Arguments against electronic voting:
1. Votes don’t work in the event of a computer shut-down.
2. The whole system could crash.
3. Concerns over which friend of Peter Mandelson would be awarded the contract to run the system.
4. Saboteurs could pour jam over the screens thus making them unusable.
5. Old people would be suspicious of the machines and there would be general mistrust about the result.
6. Thanks to the government’s mishandling of their energy policy, blackouts are likely in the coming years. What do you do if one happens on election night?
7. The system could be hacked into.
8. Paper ballots provide a quick and easy way of verifying the vote should it be disputed later.
Argument in favour of electronic voting:
1. It’s quicker.
I think this idea is dead in the water, Guido. Putting a cross next to someone’s name is a system that has worked for hundreds of years in the past and will continue to work for hundreds of years in the future. Even the illiterate (who are perfectly entitled to vote) are able to put their mark next to their candidate of choice.
Thanks for echoing my thoughts!
I’m not certain that electronic counts will work as well as you hope, though. The procurement will be a nightmare, the machines won’t work and the concerns of fraud will be considerable.
http://blog.matthewcain.co.uk/save-general-election-night-campaign-politicos-at-their-worst/
Fair enough
Electronic voting would mean we’d miss this (and might be less trustworthy):
“We in the Adder Party are going to fight this campaign on issues not personalities… because our candidate doesn’t have a personality” – sound familiar, Gordon?…
I want to see them starving,
The so-called political class,
Their wages weekly halving,
Their children eating grass.
More accurate? Are you kidding? Don’t forget that the Labour government will give the contract for writing the software for these machines to one of their cronies. Do you really think they’re above writing it in such a way as to rig the results?
Paper ballot papers satisfy all reasonable requirements for auditability and traceability.
Quicker voting could also be achieved by less voting.
In the week in which it is revealed that more women find it wrong to buy and return a dress having worn it on a special occasion, than to “persuade” a person for whom they are carer to change a will in their favour, I wonder if such moral dwarves should continue to be allowed a political say.
Universal suffrage in the UK coincided with the rise of applied psychology to marketing. Since marketing seriously hit politics and met-up with propaganda (in Slick-Willy Clinton’s reelection strategy of targeting only swing voters with “trigger” messages) there are few politicians with any semblance of reality about them.
There are only 2 ways forward. Dispense with politicians, or dispense with voters — but not both at the same time (which would be dictatorship plain and simples). Why are so few in favour of disenfranchising the politically clueless, e.g. the writers of Bella magazine?
Guido, this has been tried in the US over the past few years, and the result was the well documented fuckup that was the Presidential election in 2000.
There is now a growing backlash against the new generation of computerised voting machines, because the software is not secure enough and leaves no evidence if there is any tampering or hacking, nor any way of recounting if the result is in doubt.
The same accusation can be made against the idea of storing the balots somewhere until the folowing day, so I say count the votes as quickly as possible after the polls close, in other words the status quo (and it’s not often I argue for that in anything!!)
What you DIDN’T know about Ed Balls… Well worth taking a look at!!!….
http://ddtaylor88.wordpress.com/2009/09/08/eds-balls-what-you-didnt-know/
If I’ve read this once, I’ve read it a million times – it was even Guido’s quote of the day. Now go away and don’t come back until you’ve found something we don’t know.
He’s just another idiot trying to get clicks for his own blog – Guido keep deleting him but he returns like a bad smell…
I don’t agree. Completely open to fraud and manipulation.
Complete waste of time
They tried that in the last Scottish GE, sort of, and it bomber severely.
I think there was more a wee connection to a Welsh windbag called Kinnock.
The postal version at Glenrothes was very suspicious.
Anything that makes it more difficult to FIX is on my positive list.
Electronic systems are alright if there’s a paper trail for the vote generated in real time, verified by the voter. But the point about election night being a catharsis is well made. I’ve read too much of the technical information on the various systems for electronic voting to not be wary of the risk of sabotage or vote theft. Neither of these would be good for our democracy.
And it is the only work these fuckers do. Get them to count it overnight.
Nothing better that sitting back with a crate of grog and laughing as NuLabour get hammered in an election. The look on Dimblebums face when his beloved labour fuckwits got stiffed at the local and euro elections. This is a tradition, like the proms, wimbledon, twickers, shooting pheasents, binge drinking and bad sex – we are British and this is what we like doing, so no to digital and let the people get involved.
I would certainly be in favour of this in principle although I suspect logistical and security problems will be the arguments against it.
Electronic voting lacks the visibility necessary for a confidence in adistrusting public used to Nulabour dexterity.
A better alternative would be to give each voter a piece of shit as they enter the polling station, which they place in one of several heaps according to their preference.
The biggest pile of shit wins, just like now.
Careful now.
I’m sure the shabby party will have recruited their very own Wally O’Dell on some pink visit inside the beltloops.
Fucks sake Guido, if a Blue Peter vote can be rigged then something involving MPs and vested interests from very rich sources is bound to be rigged.
And what’s so wrong with calling a moggie, Cookie?
Get down shep.
No, it has to be the all-nighter. The one time you might hear a politician saying something vaguely honest is about 3am in a quite moment between results.
Not a chance Guido
Wasn’t a full ballot box found in a cupboard somewhere after a local bye-election?
epic, epic fail
I don’t like the idea of electronic voting. Computers can and do go wrong and lose data.
Why stay up on election night anyway? The votes are cast. The result is decided. Why not just get that result when you wake up? That’s what I do.
DC says the gravy train will well and truly hit the buffers. He has the right idea and I am pleased to say that I agree with the cuts in politics he is proposing. £120m is a huge amount of money to be saved.
AD, on the other hand, is talking about cuts in public spending, so it’s not the MP’s who will lose out, it’s us. They will keep their perks, while we have to make do with less.
Don’t be a twat!
Labour interfere with postal votes and are willing to prise open a ‘secure’ ballot box to fiddle the results. They would have a ball with digital!
Was that aimed at me?
Good rief. Remember what they did to the ballot box for their own candidate for some south east seat when somebody was gong to be parachuted in. If they do that to their own, what will they do when the result might end with one of their troughers getting kept away from the swill.
Do we really want to be deprived of the sight of all the careerist hoons as they realise their ministerial jobs and maybe membership of the House is vanishing before their eyes ?
Just imagine Ed Balls face as he realises his damned big career has hit the buffers. Imagine Gordon`s face as he realises he has destroyed the party he has given his life`s work to.
S
Sounds very good to me.
Sounds like Morley Town Hall is going to be very busy on election night.
” Just imagine Ed Balls face as he realises his damned big career has hit the buffers. Imagine Gordon`s face as he realises he has destroyed the party he has given his life`s work to.”
I have wood.
Sky are still waiting for Gordon to accept their invitation for a 3-way debate. Cameron and Clegg have already accepted.
Gordon won’t have a script this time – perhaps that’s why he doesn’t want to commit.
Shelling – I suspect he hasn’t been allowed to accept (even if he had the Courage* to do so) because he won’t be in No. 10 by the time the debate is held.
Well – we can but hope.
* copies available in all good bookstore remainder bins, price: 2/6 per dozen.
It would look a bit daft with Mandy standing behind McGay with his hand up his arse working him.
[...] Guido of course is correct, in this day and age with the digital power of technology, we ought to be able to know the result within minutes of the polls closing, but that would take away half of the drama. [...]
No way Guido I want the fucking Liebour shit out as soon as possible. I wouldn’t put it past the fucking left wing kiddie fiddlers to fix the votes either. I don’t trust the fucking scum cops or any council officials.
Liebour have a history of fiddling votes.
After all the IT disasters of Labour’s reign you want to have the Mother of All Disasters and put democracy at risk? Truly MAD.
As for the reason for why it takes so long, believe me I recall the GLA elections – what held everything up was the accursed counting machines – which, incidentally, can also be used fraudulently in an undetectable way. Add in the ridiculous postal voting system and you have a succession of built in delays.
I like it the way it is (or the way it’s supposd to be), certainly for the next election.
I’ve been looking forward to a certain party’s excruciating demise for some time. You can’t have it all over in a minute, you won’t see any spineless sanctimonious Zanu ex mp’s bawling into buckets, where’s on earth’s the fun in that?
Next election = Me + 1Ltr bottle of Scotch + several hillarious hours of quality entertainment.
The quality of Zanu’s demise should not be hastened, but dropeth slowly as the gentle rain from heaven.
Electronic voting does not have to involve computers and associated networks .
It would not require an electronic genius to design a ballot box fitted with adequate secure systems and capable of counting votes cast in secret .
These boxes could be transferred to the counting venue for downloading in public view .
This method would greatly add to the drama and excitement on election night .
We must look to Afghanistan for guidance on this.
NO WAY – there is no question but that such a system will be open to hacking and fraud. Labour may welcome this (being the most morally bankrupt, sleazy, incompetent, deceitful and duplicitous government in living memory) but we, the people, should most definitely NOT.
E-voting at the polling station would be simple and efficient and no more open to fraud than paper voting, and would cut the cost of counting, as Guido says.
There should be an option of “None of the above” or “spoil” though.
As many previous commentators- paper votes can be recounted if necessary, and their validity checked. Anyone can understand the system- so anyone can check it, and the record’s there for them to do so. Hardly anyone understands what goes on inside a computer, even if they do have full access to the relevant code.
Justice must not only be done, but be seen to be done.
Power to the people- Not the geeks.
More to the point is the problem with postal vote fraud- whether or not there actually is a significant amount, there is a strong suspicion. Needs dealing with soonest.
And yes, I’d be quite happy to wait a day or two for a proper result.
Really, it’s not that difficult a problem …
You make your choice on the screen, push vote, the vote is tallied, a receipt is printed, which you can confirm matches the candidate you selected.
You stuff the receipt in the ballot box and go home.
The result is accurately announced @10:01pm
Over the next few days, a random sample of constituency ballot-boxes are opened and manually counted, to ensure they exactly match the electronic result. (or as exactly as you can, manually counting bits of crumpled paper)
Fuck it, you could even wheel-out old National Lottery ticket machines to do the job, no multi-billion civil-service IT contract required.
We get accurate, fast results, with verification available, and with the whole process being a shit lot cheaper, giving more scope for local referenda, shorter terms in office and recall votes.
Then all we need is the Monty Brewster “None of the above” option … If that option wins, the seat remains vacant for six months till a new set of candidates makes themselves available.
With most of the costs eliminated from the mechanics of the election process, we can start getting creative, get some real democracy up and running.
Bureaucrats. Paper. Table. Crossing.
Guido, wake-up and smell the paper clips.
“we don’t need rooms full of people miscounting the vote”
No, but Somebody does.
Don’t need electronic voting, just automated counting.
Keep ballot papers flat – use an envelope or similar instead of folding before putting in the box and you are 99 of the way there.
A bit of OCR (just to find the mark) – any doubt referred to a real person.
A manual count any time later to validate the result.
The post office process millions of randomly sized items every day – processing standard sized ballot papers would be a doddle.
100% wrong on this one Guido. Electronic and and has been fiddled. Electronic can and has been cocked up. Keep the paper trail. Keep the involvement of masses of people. Keep the tension and drama. It all befits something important.
But I’m looking forward to the next election night. I’m going to be wanking myself until I shoot blood as Labour loses seat after seat.
Who counts the votes?
The electorate wouldn’t be able to cope with electronic voting. They can just about cope with writing a cross on a slip of paper using a stump of black pencil, but having to press a button….They’ll stay away in droves.
Electronic voting can be made ‘secure’ (although none of the actual implementations seen so far use such a scheme), the fundamental and non-removable security flaw is in compiling the electoral register – tantamount to a national ID database of course – where you try to tie the data to an actual person. Paper ballots are not inherently more secure in this regard – they make it harder to commit fraud by the simple expedient of making it harder to vote, so the effort required for any balance-changing fraud is massive.
The trick is to use a mathematical device called a ‘blind signature’, in which you can apply a digital signature to some data without removing its encryption. So you write down your vote along with a long random number, encrypt it, and then take it in to be signed by the electoral authority, along with all your ID to prove you’re who you say you are. Then you decrypt the voting slip, and publish it anonymously on the electoral website. Everyone can see and count all the votes, including their own. Everyone can check the signatures to see that the electoral authority signed them all. Everyone can count the total number of votes and check it matches the number of names on the register marked as having voted. And nobody, not even the authorities, can break the ciphers that protect everyone’s anonymity.
The problem, of course, is that there’s nothing in this scheme to stop the electoral authority inventing people to put on the electoral roll and adding in their votes. But the same applies to paper schemes, because the problem is not with the voting system itself, but with the accuracy and reliability of the national ID database.
I’m against e-voting, because it’s a jolly good reason for having an ID database. The minor extra convenience is not worth the price.
Yes Guido. Just like Glenrothes , a mysteriously large percentage of the vote on holiday and voting Labour. And despite the SNP asking for the results and roll records, they mysteriously disapeared!
Also the directors and owners of the companies involved in providing the count are all Labour placemen. As with the 2007 Scottish parlimanet elections.
I think the strategy requires a rethink.
or parliament even.