The Open Rights Group has published a report on the conduct of the London elections, which (64pp, 1.3Mb .pdf, and in places alarming reading) can be downloaded from here.
They quote one of the report’s conclusions thus:
“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.”
For myself, living as I do at some remove from the metropolis, the fact that the egotistical Tory bansturbator Johnson has replaced the egotistical Stalinist newt-fancier Livingstone does not matter very much (though I do consider Johnson to be too conceited and indolent to make the substantial effort that would be required on his part to be worse than Livingstone). I don’t know why London needs a mayor anyway; it’s always had a Lord Mayor, and has managed for ages quite happily without a common one as well.
The point is that Johnson was presumably no more ‘elected’ by this opaque, unverifiable and commercially-secret process than were those American politicians similarly ‘elected’ on the basis of the interpretation of voter inputs by commercial ‘voting’ machines running proprietary software.
ORG add, almost as an aside:
…the electoral timetable is likely to preclude the deployment of computers in elections for the next two years.
Does this mean that in two years’ time Gordon Brown will be re-elected after all, just like George Bush?
Of course it is expensive and ‘inefficient’ to ask people to vote on ballot-papers which are then counted by other people (and, if necessary, recounted by more other people). However, we are prepared to spend apparently unlimited amounts of money on the Olympics, in reality a mere fortnight’s worth of television content, on the basis of such nebulous quantities as ‘national status’ and ’sending messages’.
That we will spend money lavishly on this meaningless circus while economising on the basic process of what we still, somewhat optimistically, call ‘democracy’ is yet another component of the great British national disgrace.
A small but representative specimen from the ORG’s full report:
During the demonstration, ORG observers asked questions about the possibility of manually recounting a statistically significant sample of ballots on count night. They were told that such a measure was undesirable as it would “aggravate the situation”.
