Jason Kitcat

Labour did badly. It could have been worse, but not much. The Tories and LibDems both have something to cheer about but still, thanks in part to the smaller parties, several councils did not fall to LibDem or Tory control. Nothing indicates that Labour are obviously up for defeat at the next general election, but this should be a healthy reality check. The Greens made solid gains whilst only losing a single council seat nation-wide, their only one in Wales.

The LibDems were quite cheeky in using the war for campaigning when one considers they started with a position that they would only support the war if there was a UN resolution backing it. The resolution was not passed yet the LibDems fell in line to support the war. Not quite the opposition one might think they mean when reading some of their leaflets. Continuing on an anti-war theme the Respect coalition took a considerable number of votes away from left parties, particularly hurting the Greens in London who lost a seat on the assembly. UKIP also made significant progress in London taking their first two assembly seats.

An incredible part of the election story are the 500,000 spoilt ballots in the London elections. In the assembly elections 8.7% of the votes were spoilt. This makes spoilt ballots the fourth 'party' in the assembly elections behind the LibDems. In the mayoral contest spoilt ballots amounted to 20.1% of the votes. Still 85.27% of these spoilt ballots were only declared invalid on the second vote so the precise impact on the outcome of this is less clear. But simplistically 20.1% of the votes cast places spoilt ballots in third place behind the Conservative's Steve Norris. In 2000 22.09% of mayoral ballots were spoilt whilst 14.29% of the assembly ballots were rejected. So progress has been made in reducing spoilt ballots… especially in the face of higher turnout. Just for comparison at the 2001 General Election 0.38% of the ballots were spoilt – a much simpler voting system but interestingly low nevertheless. So were the high number of spoilt ballots in London due to intentional spoilage or misunderstanding?

I found the online guides for the London elections to be excellent, but it seems that they didn't reach enough people. As Catherine Bennett reported in The Guardian the leaflets that all Londoners did get were rather confusing. The fact that the electoral systems in London were different for each election and that they are all complicated doesn't help. But when so many people who wanted to vote are foiled by the bureaucracy of the process then we must be very concerned. Who knows what the results in London should really have been?

On the flight back from Sweden yesterday afternoon I was treated to a free copy of The Guardian (not much of a perk, I know). There were two excellent articles by Michael Cross tucked in there. The first article explores where e-voting is in the UK, a not unreasonable question considering the pilots this year but very much paper-based pilots this year. Cross answers the question and also rather nicely mentions that e-voting is unlikely to fundamentally change the levels of engagement in e-democracy. He argues that the money for e-voting would be better spent on e-democracy for local engagement. I quite agree, but still we need to be careful, technology won't have much impact in motivating the disengaged… but it could engage those who already care about political issues.

The other Michael Cross article looked at m-government, in particular the use of mobiles for parking in…. Sweden! With high levels of mobile phone ownership in many European countries I see much more of this happening soon – particularly when strong security and authentication isn't needed. It's a good overview… and to add colour, here's a photo I took of the m-parking signs in Gothenburg!

In today's follow-up article The Times provides more detail on the allegations of fraud being bandied about over the postal ballots. We have stories of plastic bags full of ballots and tipp-ex being used to change votes. Oh dear, oh dear.

The Telegraph meanwhile has a leader article (password protected so I'm not linking to it) using this whole postal voting mess to justify the continuation of the House of Lords. It's true that they were the only ones to try and stop these pilots being on such a large scale. Still, not sure that it logically follows that elected senators wouldn't have been equally sensible…

The Times has a major article on the increasing number of allegations, and police investigations, related to fraud in the all-postal ballots. Really it doesn't matter if they're true or not – reports like this only work to further undermine confidence in our electoral system.

CIO.com has a truly excellent article on e-voting. It's US-centric but well balanced and it covers most of the issues, including usability which often gets forgotten.

A wonderfully understated little piece appears in Wired News today:

Florida Voter Purge

A list of 47,000 “possible felons” is set to be purged from Florida's voter rolls. Local elections supervisors want to make sure the list is accurate and no legitimate voters are disenfranchised in November. In the 2000 presidential election George W. Bush “won” by just 537 votes after five weeks of recounts and challenges in Florida. During the recounts, reports surfaced that people had been removed from voting rolls even though they were not felons, so officials are naturally a bit testy about the massive purge.
— Beverly Hanly

A bit testy… and so they should be. Greg Palast showed rather convincingly that much of the 2000 'purge' was deliberately done to remove people from a demographic likely to vote Democrat. In fact they think anything between 20,000-50,000 votes were stolen!

(Interesting that in 2000 they purged 57,000 votes and this year it's 47,000 – why so similar Jeb?)

I saw yesterday a BBC local news spot on how complex the postal ballots were in parts of the North West region where there were council elections in addition to the European Parliament elections. A presenter bravely went through the steps of detaching the identification form, signing it and getting a witness to do so, voting (using two different methods), folding and inserting into envelope A only the (huge) ballots – ensuring that a barcode sticker was showing through a window. Then Envelope A had to be placed in envelope B with the declaration of identity in such a way that an address label showed through a window. “Phew” exclaimed the reporter and the presenter back in the studio. I sighed too. That's just WAY too difficult.

Thankfully, according to the one my partner received in Lancaster, the European-only postal ballots in the North West region are much simpler without detachable bits and barcodes to show in windows. The declaration of identity was also simpler, but still required a witness, unlike the postal ballots piloted in Brighton.