London Mayor votes to be counted electronically

Votes cast in the London Mayoral elections on 4 May will be counted electronically for the first time in the UK.

The system aims to cut down the counting time by at least 75 per cent. According to Rob Hughes, Greater London returning officer, this system will enable a result to be announced in just eight hours - rather than three days with the old system.

The 4 May election will include voting for local council candidates as well as a London Mayor. Ballot papers will be collected from over 4,400 stations and delivered to 14 counting centres across London.

Developed by specialist data scanning firm DRS, the technology was trialled yesterday at Hammersmith Town Hall in London. Half a million voting forms were processed during the day to check for errors in the process.

"If something does go wrong we just have to stop and start again," explained Hughes, "It's vital we get this right."

According to DRS the system is robust and reliable. The company's technology has been used for electronic counting in Norway for the last eight years and in Bosnia for three.

Completed ballot papers will be delivered to local counting centres where volunteers will feed the papers through Optical Mark Readers. Tony Lee, technical director at DRS, explained how the system works: "We can scan about two ballot papers a second, analyse the information in real time and decide whether we've managed to read a good vote or not."

Data is fed into a Microsoft SQL server database (version 7) for analysis. A bar code stops any papers being counted twice and any doubtful forms are put on one side and later sorted by hand.