New technology will make election voting more efficient

Time-consuming manual vote-counts and ballot boxes could soon be consigned to the history books, thanks to innovative new secure voting technology. The system is being developed by computer scientists at the Universities of Surrey and Birmingham, with funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), and in collaboration with the University of Luxembourg. Combining speed with total vote-counting accuracy, the system is unique because it will integrate state-of-the-art optical scanning, data processing and encryption with the tried-and-tested process of manually writing on a ballot paper. No other voting system either in use or currently under development uses such a combination, which will enable the new system to avoid the major drawbacks associated with both purely manual and purely electronic voting methods. As well as eliminating the need for laborious manual counts and recounts, which are complex and expensive to conduct, it will remove the possibility of ballot papers being miscounted, mislaid or marked (and thus invalidated) accidentally or deliberately during a manual vote-count. Similarly, although electronic voting could offer an alternative to manual voting and vote-counting, and indeed has been tested in many countries, there are serious concerns over its reliability. Some voters have even claimed that the vote shown to have been registered on the voting screen did not tally with the button they pressed.