Massive e-count exercise in bid to avoid 2012 fiasco

A MASSIVE exercise has been launched to ensure the electronic counting of votes at the next council elections in 2012 does not descend into the same fiasco as last time.

The Scottish Government has awarded the 5.2 million e-counting contract to a different consortium.

Increased large-scale testing will start within weeks to allow a full 20-month lead-in time for the operation.

Technology firm DRS and partners Electoral Reform Services, the consortium which ran the system in 2007, put in a bid for the 2012 e-counting contract, but it went instead to software giant Logica and election company Opt2Vote, who failed to win the work in 2007.

Meanwhile, DRS has won the contract for the e-counting of votes in the London mayoral elections which will be held on the same day.

Election chiefs insist they have learned the lessons from the 2007 experience and have made a number of key improvements to the contract this time.

On election night in 2007, several counts across Scotland, including Edinburgh's, had to be abandoned and resumed the next day because of problems with electronic counting machines.

In a report on the fiasco, Edinburgh's returning officer Tom Aitchison criticised DRS, saying they did not run enough training sessions; the sessions did not meet the needs of senior staff who were to oversee the count; and the sessions were too far in advance of polling day.

DRS agreed a 103,000 reduction in its fee to compensate for the problems.

In 2007, e-counting was used for both the Scottish Parliament and council elections, which were held on the same day.

Now the two sets of elections have been separated and next year's parliament elections will use traditional manual counting of votes, but the single transferable vote system used for council elections involves such complex calculations that there is no practical alternative to e-counting.

Mr Aitchison, who is also convener of the Interim Electoral Management Board for Scotland, said: "Over the last 12 months, returning officers have worked closely with the Scottish Government to develop an e-counting system specification that learns the lessons from our experience in 2007."

Logica's Aiden Honley said: "We will test, test, test until we have absolute confidence that not just the software but the whole system works.

"That will culminate in a bulk test with 165,000 ballot papers well before the election.

"We are very confident our system is extremely robust and will be fit for the job."