City chief vows to avoid repeat of 2007 election fiasco

OFFICIALS today insisted they were confident there would be no repeat of the electronic voting fiasco of 2007 as residents go to the polls today in the council elections.

Edinburgh’s chief executive and election returning officer, Sue Bruce, said the authority had done everything possible to avoid the problems of five years ago when the Edinburgh count and several others across the country had to be abandoned and resumed the next day because of a “data malfunction” with counting machines.

A report later criticised technology company DRS over inadequate training and the company agreed a £103,000 reduction in its fee.

This time, the Scottish Government has awarded the £5.2 million contract to a different consortium and there has been more testing and training.

Mrs Bruce said: “We are confident the system will do what we expect it to do on the day. We have done everything that could be done to make sure things happen as smoothly as possible.”

In case of problems, the council has organised a back-up generator. There will be spare scanning machines and senior staff from new firm Logica on site.

Ballot boxes from the 154 polling places across the city will be taken to the count venue in Meadowbank Sports Centre after the polls close at 10pm tonight, but the count will not start until 9am tomorrow. First results are expected before lunchtime and the final picture should emerge late afternoon.

E-counting means the ballot papers are scanned into the machine and candidates do not see piles of votes mounting up, so there is no prior indication of the result.

Even if candidates are only a few votes apart, Ms Bruce has already told candidates that is unlikely to be enough to order a recount. She said: “At a manual count there is more room for human error. With machines there is less room for that.”

A recount would be more likely if there were concerns about the integrity of the count processes. But Ms Bruce said officials would check with candidates and agents at each stage to make sure they were satisfied.

“Then even if they don’t like the result, it has been completely transparent process.”

The Scottish Government said the Single Transferable Vote system, first used in 2007, where voters rank candidates in order of preference, meant e-counting was inevitable because it would take two or three days to count the votes by hand.

Local Government Minister Derek Mackay said: “The Scottish Government has worked with returning officers, Electoral Commission and others to ensure that these elections are managed effectively and in the interests of the voter.”

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A live blog will bring you all the latest news as the results are declared from 11am tomorrow.

Saturday’s Evening News will feature full results from across the Lothians together with analysis of what it means and what happens next.