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I am an academic researcher who does not take a partisan position on the alternative vote referendum. I am, however, disturbed to hear claims that alternative vote will require electronic counting machines to be used.
For example there are claims from the Sun that "Up to 130 MILLION will be needed for electronic machines to count voters' alternative choices of candidate if AV is introduced" (1) These claims appear to originate from one of the campaigns (2,3).
While it is true electronic vote counting machines would be expensive, there is no reason to use electronic counting (4), and good reasons not to.
More than 200 constituencies at the last General Election had winning candidates with over 50% of the vote: Alternative Vote would have made no difference at all to the way they are counted, and we can reasonably expect the same to be true for about a third of constituencies at any future election.
Very many more counts would be extremely simple to resolve, with minor party candidates being eliminated and the counting of later preferences on that small number of ballot papers deciding the election quickly and easily.
Even for the constituencies where a more significant amount of extra counting would be needed, there is no extra technical difficulty in doing it, as compared to counting parliamentary elections on the current system. It can be done by hand easily, always involving less than a third of the total number of ballot papers cast in the constituency (when each paper is already counted twice under the existing system), and normally only a single extra counting stage. In such a situation, the extra work must be an increase of less than 17% in the amount of counting needing to be done.
The amount of extra work would also be considerably less than a full recount causes for counting parliamentary elections on the current system.
Reasons not to use electronic counting include reduced reliability (5) and reduced openness (6).
Thus as an expert in electronic voting (7), I can only see disadvantages in electronic counting for these elections, and no advantages. The claim that it will be used is absurd.
Ben Fairweather
1) www.sunvote.co.uk/cms/politics/164691/should_we_spend_%C2%A3250m_on_alternative_vote_system
2) http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/2011/01/17/no-to-av/
5) http//legacy.london.gov.uk/assembly/reports/general/counting-the-vote.pdf p8,p9
7) See for example www.communities.gov.uk/documents/localgovernment/pdf/155484.pdf
N Ben Fairweather PhD, Senior Research Fellow | Tel: +44 116 207 8098
Centre for Computing and Social Responsibility | Centre: +44 116 250 6143
Dept of Informatics, De Montfort University | Fax: +44 116 207 8159
The Gateway, LEICESTER, LE1 9BH, Great Britain | www.ccsr.cse.dmu.ac.uk
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