It's almost like postal voting - easier to rig.

I have been to one of these counts based on a very similar system to the London count.. it was rubbish.

There is very little scrutiny with these systems as most votes are never seen by observers. The system only flags up "questionable" papers, but those that it doesn't flag up are never visible. With a manual system, observers can take samples of any poll which will give them a rough idea of the real result, any major discrepancy is usually obvious.

And yes.. I spend our looking at pictures of the back of ballot papers, at papers that were stuck together and papers that shouldn't even have been flagged up. Given the amount of "false positive questionable ballots", I wonder exactly how many were mis-counted.

In this particular case, I don't think it made a difference to the overall result. But in a tighter election, it certainly could.

Electronic voting is much better since the software can ignore the inputs and go with the desired result. If people have voted the wrong way, this can be corrected before the vote is published. It saves a lot of violence and intimidation because people are free to vote the way that suits them. There is less need to use violence to make them vote a cirtain way since the results can be processed to produced the desired outcome.

If electronic voting had been available in Zimbabway then Dr Robert would have been re-elected without all the obvious violence and intimidation.

So electronic voting is much safer and more satisfying polling experience.

Repeat after me: "Technology is not always the answer"